THE PROBLEM OF 
CONSOLATION 



H-R-BENDER 





Class ^BA^lHiX£ 
Book_^_ 



CopyrightjN . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




Yours truly, 

H. R. BENDER. 



THE PROBLEM OF 
CONSOLATION 



BY 



H. R. BENDER, D.D. 

Clearfield, Pa., U. S. A. 



Press of 

THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

New York City 



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Copyright, 1912, by 
H. R. BENDER 




APR 10 1916 



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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 5 

I. The Problem of Consolation 7 

II. The Idea of God — Deistic and Theistic 25 

III. Man, as He Appears in Revelation 39 

IV. The Light of Life. As Interpreted by the Philos- 

ophy of Henri Bergson .55 

V. The Spiritual Content of Life. As Interpreted 

by the Philosophy of R. Eucken 69 

VI. Natural Law versus Spiritual Law 83 

VII. Individualism 97 

VIII. Divine Providence. An Attempted Application of 

R. Eucken's Philosophy 113 

IX. Divine Providence (Continued). Lights and Shadows 127 
X. Immortality 141 



PREFACE 

This book has grown out of a pastor's effort 
to be the bearer of consolation to thinking people 
in times of distress. To the sufferer it may be a 
problem of pain, but to the pastor whose aim is 
to lift him out of suffering it becomes a problem 
of consolation. There exists so much confusion 
as to the interpretation of God's relation to life's 
problems that the principles of God's moral gov- 
ernment are often misunderstood or overlooked. 
Words change their meaning, new facts modify 
or change the philosophy that molds sentences. 
Old interpretations that satisfied minds whose 
thinking was harmonized with former facts by 
an old philosophy do so no more. Compared 
with the time when the Scriptures were written, 
we have a new world and new facts, and with 
these a new philosophy that demands a new inter- 
pretation of our experiences to harmonize Light, 
Life, and Truth. As Paul, in his Epistle to the 
Romans, expressed the gospel in Roman terms 
and Roman modes of thought, so it becomes our 
duty to do the same for our modern world. In 
this humble effort I desire to express my indebt- 
edness to Bergson and Eucken for the principles 
that I have endeavored to work upon. 

H. R. B. 
s 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 



Are the consolations of God too 
small for thee? (Job 15. 11.) 

When they had read it, they re- 
joiced for the consolation. (Acts 

15. 31.) 

Now the God of comfort and of 
consolation grant you to be like 
minded. (Rom. 15. 5.) 

Now our Lord Jesus Christ him- 
self, and God, even our Father, who 
hath loved us and hath given us 
everlasting consolation and good 
hope through grace, comfort your 
hearts, and stablish you in every 
good word and work. (2 Thess. 2. 

16, 17.) 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

We live in a civilization that is being run by 
the spirit of competition. The whole business 
and professional world is stimulated to action by 
motives of selfishness and the spirit of rivalry. 
Our ambitions promote selfishness and our 
successes are our consolations. We are molded 
in character by the spirit of our environment. 
This environment is controlled by the lusts 
of the flesh (material gratifications), by the 
pride of life (social distinctions), and by the 
lust for power (official preeminence). These 
forces, that appeared to Christ only as tempta- 
tions, have become our masters. Under their 
control, we live by contrasts. We compare our 
advance with the places of our competitors and 
get our consolations in being the winner in the 
race. Our superior riches or place or power 
provides our consolations. But what is left for 
the seventy-five per cent of society that our com- 
petitive civilization relegates to the rear? For 
these is there nothing left to inspire hope, to 
solace grief, to awaken courage, to sustain in the 
weariness of toil and to yield those consolations 
that allay anxieties, dismiss worries, and impart 



io THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

peace ? For these classes the problem of consola- 
tion is complex and difficult. The multitudes are 
still scattered abroad as sheep without a shepherd 
and are fainting by the way. If they turn to the 
Scriptures, they see the words "affliction" and 
"anguish," "sorrow" and "distress," "suffer- 
ing" and "pain," "trouble" and "tribulation," 
"griefs" and "tears," appearing frequently 
throughout their whole extent. There is here 
no disposition to deny that these words describe 
actual experiences nor to mitigate their serious- 
ness by some philosophy of illusion. They 
describe experiences that are present everywhere 
and in every age. Standing by themselves, they 
suggest problems of human suffering. We are 
constantly asking, Whence do they come? and 
How? and Wherefore? 

Our habit is to attribute all of these sad expe- 
riences of life to God. Typhoid fever enters the 
home and death claims one or more of the chil- 
dren. We say, "God did it." Sudden death 
carries away a good Christian father at a time 
when he is most needed for the education of his 
children, and when his business cannot be made 
a success without him. For the family, to the 
sorrows of bereavement are added the sufferings 
of a financial calamity. We say, "God did it." 
By a railroad or automobile accident the support 
of the family is suddenly taken away. In a 
thousand such ways men, women, and children 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION n 

are stricken everywhere. At their funerals, over 
their open graves, in presence of heart-broken 
relatives, we say, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased 
Almighty God, in his wise providence, to take 
out of the world the soul of the departed, we 
therefore commit his body to the ground." (Rit- 
ual of Protestant Episcopal and Methodist Epis- 
copal Churches.) The assumption that this 
untimely suffering has "pleased Almighty God," 
and that it is always "his wise providence" that 
causes death, is most shocking to refined and 
sensitive natures. This utterance strikes us in 
moments of intense suffering, when we are 
eagerly looking through our tears for some ray 
of comfort, or become silent that we may hear the 
voice of God. But this committal service is 
repeated at every funeral, until the masses of the 
people can think nothing else. The belief that 
God is the author of all our calamities finds 
expression in conversations, in prayers, in 
hymns, and in literature. The influence of this 
popular conviction is to be deplored. To very 
many reflective minds the tendency is to weaken 
trust and to destroy faith in God. To them 
Christianity seems to be of no value. If they 
must believe that God is "pleased" in causing the 
agonies of human suffering, or that God is indif- 
ferent to human sorrows, as a calm, cold, 
emotionless sphinx, or that God must be an 
abstraction of Force, or merely Natural Law, 



12 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

that grinds the human heart to dust, heedless of 
our cry of distress or voice of prayer, then must 
they look in some other direction for those con- 
solations that are necessary supports of the inner 
man. They converse about the futility of all 
aspirational effort. This conviction of futility 
deprives them of vitality, depresses energy, dis- 
courages effort, and forbids enterprise. They 
come to believe that life is not worth living and 
that religion is a delusion. Society thus trained 
is being lost to the church and lost to God. To 
them the world seems to have been surrendered 
to a "pestilence that walketh in darkness and to 
a destruction that wasteth at noonday." 

"The earthquake at Lisbon, it is said, made 
multitudes of people atheists." (J. Brierly, 
Ourselves and the Universe, p. n.) The mas- 
sacres of Asia, the barbarities of Africa, the hap- 
penings and accidents of any single day in the 
civilized world, caused Carlyle to say, "God sits 
in heaven and does nothing." Brierly writes, 
"The modern mind shows us, in many directions, 
the bewilderment into which it has fallen." 
Henry van Dyke calls this "An age of doubt." 
He says that our fiction is "gloomy" and our 
poetry "despondent." "The pessimism that goes 
hand in hand with skepticism in this century is a 
cry of suffering. The closely reasoned philos- 
ophies of Schopenhauer and Hartman, with their 
premises of misery and conclusions of despair, 



, THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 13 

are only the scientific statements of a widely 
diffused sentiment of dissatisfaction and despond- 
ency in regard to life. Their spread, like that of 
some apparently new disease, is due to the fact 
that they give a name to something from which 
men have long suffered." (Van Dyke's Age of 
Doubt, p. 24.) 

Can we do nothing in this mental bewilder- 
ment but surrender to the drift and abandon all 
hope of discovering our path to some Promised 
Land that abounds in consolations? I am per- 
suaded that we can if we will be only honest 
enough to look at facts and study the problem 
anew: 

I. When Wolsey revised the English Liturgy 
(A. D. 1 5 16, amended in 1548), he made it con- 
form to that old theology that made God the 
author of all evil. As in the second and third 
centuries, no religious teacher could advance far 
without facing the question, "Whence is evil?" 
so this question appeared again in the reforma- 
tion of the sixteenth century, and the conclu- 
sions of those times are a part of our present 
inheritance. In his commentary on Paul's 
Epistle to the Romans (edition of 1525), Mel- 
ancthon asserted that "God wrought all things, 
evil as well as good ; that "He was the author of 
David's adultery and the treason of Judas, as 
well as of Paul's conversion." (Moehler's Sym- 
bolism, p. 37.) Melancthon revoked his own 



i 4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

teaching in the Augsburg Confession and the 
Lutheran Reformers accepted the correction, but 
the Swiss Reformers remained firmly devoted to 
the earlier doctrine. In his writing on "Provi- 
dence," addressed to the Landgrave (Philip of 
Hesse, A. D. 1530), Zwingle asserts that "God 
is the author, mover, and impeller to sin"; that 
"He also makes the sinner," that "by the instru- 
mentality of the creature God produces injustice 
and the like." r (Z., de Providentia, p. 365.) 
John Calvin developed his theology in harmony 
with the Swiss Reformers. Following Calvin's 
death, Beza became the leading teacher of the 
same doctrine. He taught that "the Almighty 
creates a portion of men as his instruments, with 
the intent of working evil through them." 
(Beza's Aphorism, xxii.) 

These things are mentioned here, not to dis- 
credit these noble and devout men, but to get at 
the facts. These men lived at a time when the 
mechanical philosophy of the universe was uni- 
versally accepted as true to nature. Upon that 
basis these godly men developed their theology. 
The universe was so understood even to the extent 
of thus interpreting the divine inspiration of the 
Scriptures. The universe was understood to be 
a great machine created all at once for a definite 
purpose, and was kept in operation by natural 
law. Human history simply revealed the execu- 
tion of God's designs, and in the output of the 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 15 

machine there could be no failure, because God 
had foreordained all things that come to pass. 
Possibly the best putting of this fatalistic teach- 
ing is by Pope, in his "Essay on Man." The 
essay concludes with these words, 

What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread, 
Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head ? 

Just as absurd to mourn the tasks or pains 
The great directing mind of all ordains. 

All nature is but art, unknown to thee; 

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; 

All discord, harmony, not understood; 

All partial evil, universal good. 

And, spite of pride, in erring reason spite, 

One truth is clear — whatever is, is right. 

Against the conclusions of their rigorous logic 
there was a revolt whose mouthpiece was Armin- 
ius. Although his protest was discounted on the 
ground that he was only a layman and that his 
conclusions were not worthy the respect of 
scholarship, many accepted his doctrine of man's 
free moral agency — not because they had dis- 
covered a logical harmony in the new doctrine 
with the mechanical theory of the universe, but 
because it interpreted a religious element of 
Christian consciousness. It interpreted the con- 
sciousness of a personal moral responsibility, 
without which the moral government of God over 



16 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

us is impossible. It found its support not so much 
in dogma as in the intuitions of the spiritual life. 
These men held that, for the discernment of spir- 
itual truth, we each have a faculty which, in its 
proper sphere, is as much to be trusted as our 
organs of sensation are in their spheres. They 
also contended that tKe old theological syllogism 
was too small a compass in which to confine God's 
redemptive activity ; that, while God's ways never 
contradict reason, yet they often transcend the 
limits of the rational faculty and that, for this 
reason, there is a profound sense in which we 
may "know the love of God which passeth knowl- 
edge/' on the rational level. "Ye have an unction 
from the Holy One, and ye need not that any man 
teach you." (i John 2. 20, 27.) 

When John Wesley, for his societies in Amer- 
ica, revised the "Articles of Faith" so as to make 
them conform to this newer teaching, he left the 
Ritual, as to burial, untouched. The embarrass- 
ments are manifest. The attempts of pastors 
to show that the sorrows of bereavement are not 
expressions of God's pleasure are all surrendered 
at the open grave and the broken-hearted are 
thrown back into disconsolate darkness. 

In contrast with this medieval theology there 
stands the older and truer aspirational life of 
Jewish faith. "How wonderfully was man 
placed on the summit of creation! O God, how 
wonderfully hast thou made man! A handful 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 17 

of dust, yet endowed with thine immortal breath ; 
fastened to the soil, yet faster of wing than a ray 
of light ; confined within a span of space and time, 
yet capable of soaring to the remotest ages; up 
to the stars and up to thee; fettered like a creep- 
ing animal, yet free and boundless in willing — 
thus was man made the Son of earth, the medi- 
ator between two worlds, the king in a paradise 
— exalted, that he may bend his crowned head 
before his Master. For him Death is an high 
priest who offers up a double sacrifice, sending 
the body away into the wilderness, but causing 
the spirit to ascend to God, to find peace and see 
felicity forever. Not a mound of clay is man's 
height, but the eternal mountains of the Lord ; not 
the epitaph is his record, but his life, the sphere 
in which he was a messenger of God, the shining 
inscription that he has left in the hearts of men." 
(The Jew's Book of Devotion.) In the third 
century of the Christian era, in reply to Celsus, 
Origen said, "We maintain that evil or wicked- 
ness, and the actions which proceed from it, were 
not created by God." (Ante-Nicene Fathers, 
American Edition, vol. iv, p. 598.) Had our 
liturgy been molded by the spirit of this earlier 
faith, it is reasonable to assume that it would 
have taken on a brighter, a truer, and a more 
comforting tone. 1 

1 That my meaning may be clear, the following is appended : 
Forasmuch as the silver cord of life has been loosened and the 



1 8 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

II. At the World's Parliament of Religions, 
Chicago, U. S. A., A. D. 1893, the priests of 
Oriental religions did not hesitate to say that our 
civilization is materialistic, both as to its spirit 
and its energies. Facts crowd upon us here. By 
us material forces have been applied with won- 
derful efficiency. The advances that have been 
made by the applications of steam, of electricity, 
and of explosives have been hailed as first-class 
blessings. They have brought into our vision 
opportunities for grasping vast wealth and the 
luxuries that attend it. Wealth and luxury have 
created the goals of life for which we are strug- 
gling with a self-abandonment hitherto unknown. 
We have become so commercialized in our ideals 
and in action that our whole life has taken on 
the materialistic tone. The impulses of our life 
find their reward in material acquisitions and 
in the gratifications these secure. The conflict 
between capital and labor is the only conflict that 
is being seriously considered. Now certain re- 
sults of these conditions are merely the natural 
products of our own type of life : 

First. With every advance in material effi- 

golden bowl broken, by which our bodies return to earth, and our 
spirits return to God, therefore we commit this body to the ground, 
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, looking unto God, that 
he may open unto us the gate of life, when our frailties bring us to 
the gate of death, and that we may all attain unto the resurrection 
of the just, and be found without fault before the throne of God. 
(Eccl. 12. 6, 7; Phil. 3. 11.) 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 19 

ciency by the applications of steam, electricity, 
and explosives, there have been created increased 
liabilities to accidents, to the pain of physical 
injury, and to distresses caused by sudden deaths. 

Second. In the present conflict of capital with 
labor, the alignment of the opposing forces is 
purely selfish, utterly unmoral and unreligious. 
Labor has made our Christian Sunday a holiday 
and capital has made it a work day. 

Third. After an experiment of less than two 
generations, there has developed a weariness and 
an undertone of discontent that pervades both 
our social and national life. It is a question as 
to whether our Western civilization has ever 
been in so much unrest and dissatisfaction as 
to-day. Statesmen, legislators, philanthropists, 
capitalists, and labor leaders are all seeking some 
common ground for a contented peace. But 
social justice is being brought into requisition 
only as an instrument of utility rather than as an 
inspiration of character. 

Fourth. The material prosperities of our time 
have so multiplied our opportunities and stim- 
ulated our ambitions that we work faster, walk 
faster, and eat faster than is beneficial to health. 
Unrelenting competitions have made our life 
intense and excessively strenuous. We fail to 
recognize our limitations. Under the pressure 
of ambition or competition one man does the 
work of two or three men. This excessive exer- 



2o THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

tion induces a low vitality that makes us less able 
to resist any disease. Our mortality from degen- 
erative diseases is rapidly increasing. Before the 
medical faculty of Victoria University in 1891, 
Sir James C. Brown said: "From 1859 to 1863 
there died in England of heart disease 92,181 
persons; from 1884 to 1888, 224,102 persons. 
From 1864 to 1868, nervous diseases carried off 
196,000, but from 1884 to 1888, 260,558 per- 
sons." (Max Nordau's Degeneration, p. 41.) 
An examination of our recent statistics shows 
that degenerative diseases are reaping a larger 
death harvest in America than in England. 
"Since 1880 the death rate in the United States 
from degenerative diseases has increased over 
100 per cent. Our last census also shows that 
in the United States insanity is increasing twice 
as fast as the population. Our asylums are now 
caring for 187,454 of such degenerates." (The 
North American, December, 191 1.) According 
to Nordau, the first mark of degeneration is inor- 
dinate egotism. The egotist becomes the incar- 
nation of selfishness. He lacks amiability, 
becomes unsocial, and loses respect for the opin- 
ions of others. His moral sensibilities are 
blunted and he has a confused sense of right 
and wrong. He becomes weak morally, then 
lacks modesty, and finally lacks decency. The 
second mark is impulsiveness, an inability to 
resist the indiscretions of an impulsive life. His 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 21 

appetite, lusts, and passions control him. In 
obedience to these inward forces he does dis- 
creditable things, immoral things, wrong things. 
The people who abandon themselves to drunken- 
ness on holidays, and the stream of humanity 
daily passing through our police courts, and 
finally into our jails and reformatories, are 
of this class. The third mark is excessive emo- 
tionalism that develops into hysteria. This is 
a nervous weakness that requires careful hand- 
ling to prevent suicide. "There is an enormous 
increase of hysteria in our day." (Nordau, 
Degeneration, p. 36.) In our bodies this degen- 
eration finds expression in diseases of the heart, 
nerves, blood, kidneys, and brain. This modern 
drift of society should awaken the deepest con- 
cern. It is the sad product of our "material 
civilization" that shows how invaluable the 
Christian church has been, and how necessary 
it is for the welfare of the individual and of 
society to-day. 

III. There is another group of facts that afford 
some relief to this dark picture. 

First. We have discovered that many sorrows 
of bereavement once thought to be God's punish- 
ments are in reality due to our own indiscretions. 
"Eighty years ago, when the Norwegians were a 
drinking people, three hundred out of every one 
thousand children born died within twelve 
months. Now, since they are sober people, the 



22 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

death rate is only from eighty to ninety per one 
thousand. In Bavaria, where the drink evil still 
exists, of every one thousand children born, three 
hundred do not survive a year." (The Lutheran 
Standard, 191 1.) 

Second. Many diseases that we once thought 
were God's punishments are now discovered to 
be only "filth diseases" and, being such, may be 
banished by ourselves. By a prudent regard of 
the laws of hygiene, typhoid fever has been 
almost banished. The discovery of antitoxine 
has reduced diphtheria eighty per cent. Quar- 
antine and improved methods of medical treat- 
ment have reduced contagious diseases ninety 
per cent. Recent discoveries of causes and of 
antitoxines have enabled the people of the South 
to almost throw off the scourge of yellow fever. 
The Journal of the American Medical Associa- 
tion states : "A day will come when man will not 
die of diphtheria, of scarlet fever, of cholera, or 
of tuberculosis." Pasteur says: "It is in the 
power of man to make all parasitic diseases dis- 
appear from the earth." "Before antisepsis was 
introduced into surgery, the death rate in com- 
pound fractures was two out of three, whereas 
to-day it is less than one in fifty. Hospital gan- 
grene, erysipelas, and blood poisoning, once 
the scourge of hospitals and army camps, are 
now almost unknown after operation." (E. E. 
Hyde, M.D., The Journal of the American Medi- 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 23 

cal Association.) Now these modern remedies 
have been always with us. God left only their 
discovery and application to us, as he left the 
stored coal in our hills. By this education we are 
learning that epidemics that we used to attribute 
to the wrath of God ought to be attributed to our 
own carelessness. Our pure-food laws are wit- 
nesses of our awakening, and under the same 
consciousness of human responsibility, we see a 
State-wide effort of hygienic energy. 

When it was the fashion to attribute all dis- 
eases to moral causes, Christ's disciples asked 
him concerning a certain blind man, "Master, 
who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was 
born blind?" His answer was, "Neither has this 
man sinned nor his parents." (John 9. 2, 3.) 
Christ's example teaches us that such afflictions 
call for sympathy rather than for censure; for 
the care of a physician rather than for the 
curse of the priest; and for the shelter of 
charity rather than exposure to brutality. Our 
modern philanthropic agencies are the Chris- 
tian interpreters of God's attitude toward 
suffering humanity. The most encouraging 
aspect of our times is the developed moral con- 
sciousness that many things among us are 
radically wrong; that our material ideals are too 
low ; that money-power has been given an unmer- 
ited supremacy over character-power; that our 
social, civil, and national security demands that 



24 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

we live in a moral world as well as in a money 
world ; that we must come under the moral gov- 
ernment of God as well as under the civil 
government of the state. Since we find that God 
has placed the banishment of all parasitic, or 
germ diseases in our own power, the fault of this 
kind of suffering is with ourselves. Here, and 
in degenerative diseases, our sin is its own pun- 
ishment. Our health will be improved, our 
happiness be more secure, and our life will take 
on a higher and holier meaning when we learn 
to relate ourselves to the moral government of 
God. 



II 



THE IDEA OF GOD— DEISTIC AND 
THEISTIC 



»S 



God spake unto the fathers in the 
prophets, and unto us in his Son. 
(Heb. 1. 1, R. V.) 

God was in Christ, reconciling- the 
world unto himself. (2 Cor. 5. 19.) 

It pleased God ... to reveal his Son 
in me. (Gal. 1. 15, 16.) 

If any man love me, he will keep my 
words ; and my Father will love him, 
and we will come unto him and make 
our abode with him. (John 14. 23.) 

I am the vine, ye are the branches : 
he that abideth in me and I in him, 
the same beareth much fruit. (John 
15. 5.) 



II 

THE IDEA OF GOD— DEISTIC AND 
THEISTIC 

I. The idea of God has its origin in man's 
interpretation of his environments. At first man 
observes the mighty forces of nature that silently 
cooperate with him, or antagonize him. He 
endows these forces with a personality or will. 
With them he strives to enter into personal rela- 
tions, in order to make them serviceable to him. 
Because these nature-forces seem to be superior 
to his own, man regards them as gods, and he 
attempts to propitiate them by sacrifices. There 
follows the development of Polytheism. These 
personalized natural forces receive names and 
are symbolized by idols or images. "The Ca- 
naanites and the Phoenicians worshiped Baal, a 
Sun-God and a male divinity. Assyria and Sidon 
worshiped Astarte, the Queen of Heaven. Baby- 
lon worshiped Bel, the God of the Planets. Moab 
and the Ammonites worshiped Chemosh, identi- 
cal with Moloch, the king who demanded human 
sacrifices. " (Schultz, Old Testament Theology, 
vol. i, p. 103.) The Greek and Latin divinities 
teach the same lesson. 

The Jew felt no more in need of proving the 

existence of God than of proving his own exist- 

27 



28 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

ence. As he became conscious of self, he also 
became conscious of a power other than self. 
He seems to have reasoned thus : "I did not make 
this world for myself. I came into it. I found 
it here. I shall go out of it and leave it here. 
That power, force, wisdom, and will back of me, 
and back of creation, is God. The waters never 
grow weary. Clouds are fountains of water, 
directed by a power greater than mine. The 
wind develops an energy that is invisible. I plant 
a grain of corn and a power that I cannot see, 
and other than mine, develops it and puts it in 
possession of a harvest." Now this perpetual 
power or will that is back of all nature and that 
causes the lower forms of creation to be the 
servants of the higher, so clearly revealed God 
to the Jew that he could only think that man to 
be a "fool" who said in his heart, or in real sin- 
cerity, "There is no God." (Psa. 14. 1 and 53. I.) 
II. Throughout the Old Testament the deistic 
and the theistic ideas of God run side by side. 
They form two distinct currents of thought and 
issue into two distinct types of religious life. 
"Deism represents God to be an objective person 
living apart from his world, transcending it and 
interested in it, as the maker of a machine is 
interested in the fruit of his genius, or as a king 
is interested in governing his subjects. God 
becomes a name for a colossal King-Emperor 
whose palace is in the heavens. There he lives, 



THE IDEA OF GOD 29 

in the seclusion of royalty, removed by resources 
of power from the frailty of human life. Myr- 
iads of mankind appear, live their lives of 
struggle and sorrow, die, and pass to the judg- 
ment amid the shadows of the unknown/' (C. 
Cuthbert Hall, Christian Belief Interpreted by 
Christian Experience, pp. 41, 42.) In harmony 
with this deistic idea we find expressions like 
these: "God is in heaven and thou upon earth." 
(Eccl. 5. 2.) Because his dwelling is in heaven, 
he is fifteen times called "The God of heaven." 
"The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and 
in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his 
feet." (Nah. 1. 3.) "He rode upon a cherub 
and did fly; yea, he did fly upon the wings of 
the wind. He made darkness his secret place. 
His pavilion, round about him, were dark waters 
and thick clouds of the skies." (Psa. 18. 10, 11.) 
Lightning flashes were revelations of his pres- 
ence and the thunder was his voice. God was far 
away. Job was greatly distressed with this con- 
viction. 

Under this conception God was thought of as 
an absent landlord, who had left his laws to be 
carried into effect by Moses or by kings. De- 
feats, calamities, famine, pestilence, and the like, 
were interpreted to be expressions of God's 
wrath. By these coercive measures Israel was 
called to repentance and to a reformation of life. 
Upon this moral level man's chief concern is his 



3 o THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

success in placating God's wrath. The result 
is the development of a religion of merit that so 
strongly confronted Christ, and against which 
Christ set himself with all his power. 

Now alongside of this deistic view of God 
we find the theistic view, which flows with a 
deeper and stronger current, and finally, in the 
New Testament, conquers the entire field. The 
theistic conviction is that God reveals himself 
at the summit of his creation, and since man is 
that summit, our surest knowledge of God is to 
be gained in the field of human consciousness. 
Since we are God's offspring, we should know 
God as a child knows his parent. This is not 
a school knowledge, but a life knowledge; it is 
not information, but it is acquaintance. Christ's 
knowledge is that of sonship (Luke 10. 22), and 
for that reason God is native to him. "God is 
love." "God is light/' "God is spirit." God 
gathers into himself these higher attributes of 
humanity, in whom they take on a more abun- 
dant life ; the wealth of a universal consciousness ; 
the power of an all-conquering personality. We 
are related to this more abundant life as the 
branch is related to the vine, or as the personality 
of the child is related to the personality of the 
parent. To that child the parent is spirit or life, 
is love and light. By natural relationship and 
by sympathy the child lives into the ideals, the 
spirit, and the enthusiasms of the parent. The 



THE IDEA OF GOD 31 

child sees his way out of mental and moral dark- 
ness by means of a parental illumination. So we 
see light in God's light. (Psa. 36. 9.) The love 
of the parent has begotten the love of the child. 
So we are begotten of God, and by the living 
process, or by intuition, we know the love of God 
that passeth that knowledge gained by the discur- 
sive faculty. (Eph. 3. 19.) This theistic concep- 
tion has been restored to the church by the revised 
translation of Hebrews (1. 1), in that we now 
read that "God spake unto the fathers in the 
prophets, " not by the prophets, and now speaks 
unto us "in his Son." In the Old Testament, 
"the God of heaven" becomes the God of Abra- 
ham, of Isaac, of Jacob, and "the God of 
Israel." The radiant face of Moses is a mute 
witness of God's presence in the man. (Exod. 
34. 29.) The seventy elders of Israel are raised 
to religious efficiency only as the Spirit that is 
in Moses becomes a living energy also in them. 
(Num. 11. 17, 25.) The personality of the 
prophet is controlled by the Spirit of God that 
possesses him. Like John the Baptist, he 
becomes the voice of God in a moral wilderness. 
By such inward reinforcement of personality 
God acts, directs, and shapes human destiny. 

Jesus condemns and passes beyond the inferior 
conceptions of God found in the Old Testament 
and alive in his day. One of these inferior con- 
ceptions was that of the Pharisee who tried to 



32 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

establish his merit of God's blessing upon his 
own tithe record of sacrifice. His religion was 
a commercial relation of himself with his King- 
God in order to escape the divine wrath. Jesus, 
replies, "Yes, you tithe mint, anise, and cummin, 
but you neglect the more important demands of 
justice, mercy, and faith." Here Jesus raises 
religion up from the commercial level to an 
inspirational level, and up from the ceremonial 
level to a moral or ethical level, where justice, 
mercy, and faith are no longer the servants of 
a selfish utility, but where they become types of 
a divine living energy that redeems life from 
its sordid selfishness and transforms it into the 
likeness of the Son of God. 

Another of these inferior conceptions of a 
King-God was that he was "angry with the 
wicked." "The anger of the Lord was kindled 
against this land, to bring upon it all the curses 
that are written in this book. And the Lord 
rooted them out of their land in anger and in 
wrath and in great indignation." (Deut. 29. 
27, 28.) Poverty, leprosy, paralysis, and blind- 
ness evinced the wrath of this King-God. Now, 
when Jesus says, "Love your enemies, that ye 
may be the children of your Father which is in 
heaven" (Matt. 5. 44, 45), he makes the old con- 
ception of God impossible. Again, when James 
and John would cherish the wrath of Elijah to 
destroy a village of Samaria in the name of 



THE IDEA OF GOD 33 

religion, Jesus rebukes them for their spirit of 
hot-headed retaliation, because it is alien to the 
spirit of God. (Luke 9. 54-56.) 

Jesus entirely explodes the conviction that 
God even holds himself aloof from sinners. His 
cordial and sympathetic intercourse with sinners 
is his interpretation of God's attitude toward 
them. In the eyes of Jesus, sin is its own pun- 
ishment, just as is degeneration of any sort. The 
consciousness of moral depravity called forth his 
sympathy, and he went among them as a physi- 
cian with a great philanthropic heart on a mis- 
sion of mercy. Sinful men are simply God's 
prodigal children who have gone away from their 
Father's embrace, but never out of their Father's 
heart. If they are saved, it will not be because 
they are cursed and driven back like slaves by 
the wrath of God, but because they come to 
themselves, come to the consciousness of their 
own self-respect and dignity of manhood, which 
enables them to revolt against a life of moral 
depravity. Then, no matter if the beast in them 
has carried them downward to the low levels of 
brutality, they can yet say, "I will arise and 
go to my Father." (Luke 15. 18.) It may be a 
hard and humiliating return that would have 
ended in despair if the father had not anticipated 
his son's return and met him on the road with 
a "compassion" that is as deep as life, as broad 
as humanity, and as high as heaven. Because 



34 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

God was in that father he became the revealer 
of God. It is thus that attributes of God come 
to blossom in human life before they get into 
the dictionary. 

III. With this theistic conception of God, as 
a New Testament treasure, the gospel was com- 
mitted as a sacred trust to the Christian church. 
If Clement of Alexandria and his pupil Origen 
may be taken as expositors of the faith of the 
Ante-Nicene Fathers, the theistic idea of God 
was preserved until the fourth century. Clement 
says: "God is being. God is mind, the first 
principle of reasoning and judgment, and the 
first principle in moral action that makes it 
good." (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. ii, p. 439. 
American Edition.) He taught that Christ was 
the incarnation of wisdom, knowledge, and truth. 
All the powers of the Spirit were focalized in 
him. As God was in Christ, so he prays that God 
may be in us. Origen says: "God is light, that 
light which illuminates the understanding. Then 
in God's light we see light. We walk in the light 
as he is in the light/' (Ante-Nicene Father s r 
vol. iv, p. 242. ) 

In the fourth century a great change took place 
as to this fundamental doctrine. The idea of God 
became deistic and gradually ceased to be the- 
istic. Augustine introduced the change and con- 
structed his theology upon the Old Testament 
conception of God. His theology was trium- 



THE IDEA OF GOD 35 

phant during the Dark Ages. It also entered 
largely into the theology of the reformation of 
the sixteenth century, and in the Roman Catholic 
Church continues in strength until this day. 
With reference to original sin, "he represents 
humanity as cut off from all relationship with 
God, and God is depicted as a crudely anthro- 
pomorphic Being, far removed from the universe, 
and accessible only through the mediating offices 
of an organized church." (Fiske, The Idea of 
God, p. 94. ) Fiske adds, "The idea of God upon 
which all this Augustinian doctrine is based is 
the idea of a Being actuated by human passions 
and purposes, localizable in space, and utterly 
remote from that inert machine, the universe in 
which we live, and upon which he acts intermit- 
tently through the suspension of what are called 
natural laws." 1 

This conception of God was eagerly grasped 
by those Roman people who were occupied in 
constructing an imperial church. It made the 
head of the church the vicegerent of an absent 
Lord. It put the scepter of power into human 
hands. It created the supposed conflict between 
religion and science. It retarded investigation 



1 "With few exceptions every child born of Christian parents in Western 
Europe, or in America, grows up with an idea of God, the outlines of which were 
engraven upon men's minds by Augustine fifteen centuries ago. Nay, more, it 
is hardly too much to say that three fourths of the body of doctrine, currently 
known as Christianity, unwarranted by Scripture, and never dreamed of by 
Christ and his apostles, first took coherent shape] injthe writings of this mighty 
Roman." (Fiske, The Idea of God, p. 9S-) 



36 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

and embarrassed original research. By its 
kindred doctrine of total depravity it degraded 
the human family into the children of the devil 
and made their restoration to God possible only 
by regeneration through the sacraments con- 
trolled by the church and through the grace of 
adoption. This mental vision of God has con- 
structed a type of theology that is harsh and 
severe. It brought to the front coercive and 
threatening aspects of religion with the vigor of 
a supreme court. For success the church relied 
upon awakening the fears of mortals by reviv- 
ing the Old Testament visions of the wrath of a 
King-God and by the anathemas of the church. 
Threats of punishment took the place of convic- 
tions of truth. The religious inquisitions con- 
ducted by the church were the natural sequence. 

In the Protestant Churches these two ideas of 
God are not usually denned. Frequently preach- 
ers and Sunday school teachers adopt the inferior 
conceptions of God as found in the Old Testa- 
ment, instead of being loyal to the New Testa- 
ment teaching. This contradiction of the New 
Testament spirit develops contradictions and 
invites failure. This confusion may be largely 
responsible for the sad alienation of the masses 
from the church at this time. "If preachers were 
asked what was the gravest element in the 
present situation, they would unhesitatingly 
answer, A decaying sense of God." (E. Hermon, 



THE IDEA OF GOD 37 

The Christian World's Pulpit, July, 1912, p. 
363.) "To restore the idea of God to some sort 
of vital and active connection with human life is 
the great religious problem of the present time." 
(Macdonald, Life in the Making, p. 187.) 



Ill 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELA- 
TION 



39 



When I consider thy heavens, the 
work of thy fingers, the moon and the 
stars, which thou hast ordained ; what 
is man, that thou art mindful of him ? 
and the son of man that thou visitest 
him ? for thou hast made him but little 
lower than God, and crownest him 
with glory and honor. Thou madest 
him to have dominion over the works 
of thy hands ; thou hast put all things 
under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, 
and the beasts of the field, the birds 
of the heavens, and the fish of the 
sea, whatsoever passeth through the 
paths of the seas. (Psa. 8. 3-8, R. V.) 



40 



Ill 

MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION 

I. Throughout the Old Testament Scriptures 
there run two distinct estimates of human char- 
acter. The one puts emphasis upon man's inher- 
ent littleness and the other upon his inherent 
greatness. The one declares man's moral de- 
pravity, the other proclaims his moral dignity. 
The one puts man far down in degeneration, 
while the other exalts him as the divine instru- 
ment of a regenerating efficiency. Job exclaims, 
"What is man, that thou shouldst magnify 
him, and that thou shouldst set thine heart 
upon him? Behold the stars are not pure in 
thy sight; how much less man that is a worm, 
and the son of man that is a worm?" (Job 
25. 5, 6.) The Psalmist utters a similar esti- 
mate, "Lord, what is man that thou takest 
knowledge of him, or the son of man, that 
thou makest account of him? I was as a 
beast before thee." (Psa. 144. 3 and 73. 22.) 
Solomon says : "I said in mine heart concerning 
the estate of the sons of men, that God might 
manifest [prove] them, and that they might see 

that they themselves are beasts. . . . Man hath 

41 



42 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

no preeminence above the beast: for all is 
vanity." (Eccl. 3. 18, 19.) 

This humiliating estimate of man became very 
pronounced in the theology of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. Apparently in order to magnify the salva- 
tion of mankind wrought out by Christ, the fall 
of Adam and of his posterity was described as 
a "total depravity." The Formula of Concord 
(1577) "compares the unconverted man to a 
column of salt, Lot's wife; a statue without 
mouth or eyes, a dead stone, block and clod, and 
denies to him the least spark of spiritual power." 
"He cannot even accept the gospel (which is the 
work of pure grace), but he may reject it, and 
thereby incur damnation." (Schaff's Creeds of 
Christendom, vol. i, p. 313.) The Belgic Con- 
fession (1561) defines original sin to be "an 
hereditary disease wherewith infants themselves 
are infected" even prior to birth, and that man 
"is vile and abominable in the sight of God." 
(Schaff's Creeds of Christendom, vol. iii, p. 
400.) The Augsburg Confession (1530) defines 
original sin to be a "disease" that issues in 
"eternal death upon all that are not born again 
by baptism and the Holy Spirit." It denies that 
children are saved without baptism. (Schaff's 
Creeds of Christendom, vol. iii, pp. 8 and 13.) 
The Westminster Confession (1647) asserts that 
by the fall man became "wholly defiled in all the 
faculties and parts of soul and body, utterly indis- 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION 43 

posed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, 
and wholly inclined to evil" ; that by the fall "man 
hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual 
good accompanying salvation," elect infants, 
dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by 
Christ through the Spirit, but others, not elected, 
cannot be saved." (SchafFs Creeds of Christen- 
dom, vol. iii, pp. 615 and 625.) 

II. In contrast with this humiliating estimate 
of manhood, the Scriptures retain man at the 
summit of creation. Whatever the fall may 
mean, it is clear that man did not, nor does, fall 
beneath the moral government of God; that his 
fall resulted in his moral consciousness of good 
and evil, of right from wrong, of moral duty and 
moral responsibility. Wherefore subsequent to 
the fall "The Lord God said, Behold, the man has 
become as one of us, to know good and evil." 
(Gen. 3. 22.) From this point onward, God's 
government of man is purely moral. It predicates 
man's free moral agency and relies for its effi- 
ciency upon man's developed consciousness of 
"ought" and "ought not." The consciousness 
of the contrast between what I am and what 
I ought to be enables me to respond to God, when 
he says, "Come, let us reason together: though 
your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as 
snow ; though they be red like crimson, they shall 
be as wool." (Isa. 1. 18.) The old rabbinic 
teaching is that "God created angels with an 



44 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

absolute inability to commit sin, and that he cre- 
ated beasts with their exclusively animal desires. 
Then he created man as a combination of both 
angel and beast, so that man might be able to 
follow either the good or evil inclination. Man's 
evil deeds reduce him to the brute-level, and his 
good deeds elevate him to the level of angels." 
(S. Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theol- 
ogy, p. 81.) 

In Genesis, man's first enemy appears as a ser- 
pent, the symbol of malice, hypocrisy, deceit, and 
falsehood, with professions of friendship. It 
symbolizes the charms and temptations of the 
world outside of man. It comes from man knows 
not where, and its object he does not know. We 
advance only to the next chapter to see how Abel 
has triumphed in the higher department of his 
nature, while Cain has fallen the victim of his 
animal impulses. Upon this low level the question 
to Cain is, "Why art thou wroth? and why is thy 
countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt 
thou not be accepted ? and if thou doest not well, 
sin croucheth at the door. Unto thee should be 
its desire, and thou shouldest rule over it." 
(Gen. 4. 6, 7.) Here Cain's sin takes on the 
personification of the beast of his own nature. It 
is the triumph of his animalism over his manhood 
that has driven him under cover. His counte- 
nance is fallen ; he suffers the lashings of a guilty 
conscience. The sunbeam of innocence has fled 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION 45 

from his eye, so that he can no longer look inno- 
cence in the face. He would like to go forth, but, 
like the murderer or burglar, he keeps in the 
shade, because sin, like a cruel tiger, crouches at 
the door. With this definition of sin Plato is in 
striking harmony. Plato's ideal character con- 
sists in the righteous rule of man's reason over 
his impulses and appetites. Those who know not 
reason and virtue, and are always busy with 
gluttony and sensuality, never pass into the true 
upper world, nor are they filled with true being. 
The animal in them becomes their supreme ruler. 
"Now unrighteousness consists in feasting the 
monster and strengthening the beast in one, in 
such wise as to weaken and starve the man ; while 
righteousness consists in so strengthening the 
man within him that he may govern the many- 
sided monster." "Righteousness subjects the 
beast to the man, or rather to the God in man, 
and unrighteousness is that which subjects the 
man to the beast." (W. D. Hyde, The Five 
Great Philosophies of Life, p. 156.) 

The Scriptures proceed to give us concrete 
examples of the triumphs of righteousness in 
which the dignity and glory of manhood appear. 
They tell us that Enoch and Noah "walked with 
God"; that Abraham was called "the friend of 
God"; that Isaac and Jacob enjoyed immediate 
access to God ; that Moses became not simply the 
herald of a gospel, but the executor of a divinely 



46 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

outlined mission. About Moses gather men 
having strength of body and mind, "men of truth, 
hating covetousness and fearing God," and these 
are denned as "able men." (Exod. 18. 21.) Out 
of this class come the religious leaders of Israel, 
the members of the Sanhedrin and the prophets. 
Their grasps of faith upon the realities of their 
spiritual visions have given to the world prayers 
that were rewarded with answers. These 
prayers will live forever. Prophets like Samuel, 
Nathan, Elijah, and Elisha embody the spirit of 
statecraft and become the counselors of kings. 
When these men are no longer tolerated in court, 
nor longer stand in favor with the people, they 
dare to stand alone, dare to reprove and warn and 
exhort in the name of God. Under the most 
adverse conditions they demonstrate the possi- 
bility of living a life honorable to manhood and 
pleasing to God. With John the Baptist these 
men prepared the way for the coming Messiah. 
Concerning John, Christ asks the multitude, 
"What went ye out into the wilderness to see ? A 
reed shaken by the wind ? a man of weak will ? a 
man whose moral convictions lacked courage? 
a man who could be tossed every way by the 
blasts of popular sentiment? Is this the kind of 
a man who appears as the flower of the Old 
Testament culture? But what went ye out into 
the wilderness to see? A prophet? Yea, I say 
unto you, and more than a prophet. Among 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION 47 

them that are born of women, there hath not 
risen a greater than John the Baptist." (Matt. 
11. 7-1 1.) Here manhood stands forth in its 
proper dignity. 

We might stop here and be content if John 
himself did not declare that Jesus was so much 
mightier than he, that the prophet was not 
worthy, stooping down, to unloose the thongs of 
his sandals. In the presence of Christ we stand 
before the Teacher of the ages and are exhorted 
to learn of him. Where, then, does he place 
man? Can we discover whether he puts the 
emphasis upon man's total depravity or upon the 
essential elements of manhood? It is significant 
that the common people hear him gladly, and that 
publicans and sinners are attracted to him. 
These people had been repelled and cursed by 
the church. Jesus found them wandering abroad 
as sheep without a shepherd and fainting by the 
way. Their suffering and degeneration had 
been attributed to the wrath of God. These con- 
victions, added to their discouragements, had 
driven them to the borderland of despair. Jesus 
found himself out of sympathy with the attitude 
of the church toward these people. He directs 
the attention of the church party to the sincerity 
of the praying publican, and to the poor widow 
who cast but two mites into the temple treasury. 
He rebukes the crowd that commanded blind 
P>artimseus to endure his affliction in silence. He 



48 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

becomes the moral liberator of men held in 
ecclesiastical bondage. He ignores the humilia- 
tions of poverty and makes the coat of the poor 
man as sacred as the garb of the priest, and the 
altar of God as accessible for the beggar as for 
the ruler of the synagogue. Material poverty did 
not trouble Jesus so much as poverty of mind, of 
affection, of aspiration. At every turn of the 
road Jesus rebukes the spirit that would crush 
hope, would chill aspiration, and would freeze 
moral consciousness by the utterance of a curse, 
or of an epithet like that of "dog." To Jesus an 
ideal reality was possible to every man. The key- 
note of Christ's message is his teaching concern- 
ing the divine Fatherhood. Man is the child of 
God by nature. He may be overcome by the de- 
pravities of his lower nature, but in this life the 
bond of his higher relationship remains unbroken. 
His story of the prodigal son is Christ's ever- 
lasting picture of the dual possibility of obedience 
and disobedience. These two possibilities live in 
the house of one great fatherhood. "A certain 
man had two sons," and from the embrace of the 
father's love neither son ever departs. Even in 
his degeneration the prodigal continues to be his 
father's son, and when he comes to himself, it is 
to say, "I will arise and go to my father." The 
compassionate greeting of the father is Christ's 
picture of the greeting that God accords to every 
returning prodigal. In harmony with this teach- 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION 49 

ing he tells all men to pray, "Our Father, who 
art in heaven." Here Christ clearly holds man- 
hood up to its highest level. 

Then from another angle Jesus puts the em- 
phasis of his teaching upon the sacred relation 
of humanity to God. He becomes "much dis- 
pleased" when mothers are forbidden to bring 
their little children to him for his blessing. He 
bids them a cordial welcome, takes them up in 
his arms and justifies his act by saying, "Of such 
is the kingdom of heaven." Then he adds, "Take 
heed that ye despise not one of these little ones ; 
for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels 
do always behold the face of my Father which is 
in heaven." (Matt. 18. 10.) At this point the 
churches of the Reformation experienced great 
embarrassment. That they might main n their 
doctrine of man's total depravity, the\ asserted, 
in harmony with the teaching of Lne Roman 
Catholic Church, the doctrine of baptismal re- 
generation and the condemnation of all unbap- 
tized children. Zwingle was the first to dispute 
this doctrine, on account of his belief that all elect 
children are saved, whether baptized or not. 
Finally he thought that all children, dying in 
infancy, belonged to the elect, and were 
therefore saved. A review of church doctrines 
shows that this concession to the teaching of 
Christ was very reluctantly given, but to-day the 
doctrine of infant damnation is practically aban- 



50 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

doned. We no longer baptize infants to make 
them fit for the kingdom of heaven, but we bap- 
tize them because they are fit. Christian baptism 
has become the church's recognition of their 
sacred and saved relation with God. They 
justify Christ's teaching by their living relation 
to the best and purest affections of our nature. 
They rebuke our selfishness, enlarge our sym- 
pathies, elevate our aims, and enrich the human- 
itarian side of our life. By them innocence, love, 
and trust are rescued from the world of abstract 
thought by taking on flesh and blood. They are 
God's buddings of divinity coming into blossom 
in earthly soil. When death summons them 
away, we cannot escape the conviction that God's 
messenger has been with us and is now calling us 
to heaven. 

"He seemed a cherub who had lost his way 

And wandered hither; so his stay 
With us was short, and 'twas most meet 

That he should be no delver in earth's clod, 
Nor need to pause and cleanse his feet 

To stand before his God, 
O blest word — evermore." 

— (Lowell's "Threnodia") 

This improved conception of childhood has 
required us to revise our former conceptions of 
manhood. The old theology that degraded man 
to the animal level, where he could no longer be 
called the son of God, proceeded to make him a 
son of God by the "new birth" and by "adoption." 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION 51 

(Schaff's Creeds of Christendom, vol. iii, p. 497.) 
To-day we insist that every man is entitled to the 
"new birth" in virtue of his divine sonship. 
When a man awakens to the consciousness of 
right and wrong, so as to see the contrast 
between what he is and what he ought to be, and 
then gives heed to the voice of duty as the voice 
of divine authority over him, he must enter into 
a birth-consciousness of a new spiritual life. 
"Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the 
Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, 
Father." (Gal. 4. 6.) "The Gentiles, in that 
they have not the law, do by nature the things 
contained in the law. . . . They show the work 
of the law written in their hearts, their conscience 
also bearing witness." (Rom. 2. 14, 15.) Here 
light is thrown upon Christ's method of gaining 
and training disciples. He always took men at 
their prayer value, rather than at their profes- 
sional value. That he might not discount man- 
hood, Jesus never took any man at a disad- 
vantage. He always left the way open for man- 
hood to come into its best expression. He always 
manifested sympathy for man's better nature, as 
against his inferior states of consciousness. "He 
always helped Peter in his fight with Simon." 
Matthew is a collector of taxes for the Roman 
government. As such, he is hated and despised 
by his brethren. He has been excluded from the 
synagogue, and in Jewish controversies is not 



52 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

permitted to give testimony. Matthew is con- 
scious of this social ostracism and expects only 
contemptuous treatment from his fellow country- 
men, but Jesus passes that way. He sees in 
Matthew the man rather than the office. Jesus 
appeals to his better nature and asks him to close 
up his accounts and follow him as a disciple. The 
opportunity to rise to a life of higher level appeals 
to Matthew with an irresistible power. Having 
become a disciple, the nobility of his manhood 
finds expression in an elaborate feast, to which 
Matthew gathers "a great company of publi- 
cans." Here is a prophet who gives even such 
men credit for greatness of soul, for sincerity of 
motive, and for possibilities of divine fellowship 
that are honorable to their consciousness of man- 
hood. Christ's spirit toward them makes his 
presence like the sun shining upon them at mid- 
night. 

Again Jesus passes through Jericho, where 
another Jewish tax collector has grown rich. 
This man also feels his social ostracism, knows 
that he is hated and is excluded from the syna- 
gogue as a moral degenerate. He tries to see 
Jesus as he passes, but is forbidden by the crowd. 
He then climbs a tree. Jesus sees him — not the 
publican, but the man. He shows Zacchaeus his 
recognition of the tax collector's manhood by 
calling him to come down that he may be enter- 
tained at his house. Zacchaeus is put upon his 



MAN, AS HE APPEARS IN REVELATION S3 

honor, and he does his best. This frank, honor- 
able, and cordial greeting of the Prophet gets a 
like response from Zacchseus. As they sit at 
table, Zacchaeus finds his heart enlarged by the 
influence of this great personality. The relation- 
ship is so cordial, so sincere, so sympathetic, 
that Zacchseus feels that there must be some 
good in himself after all, and down in his heart 
he says, "O, to be like him ! O, to be like him !" 
Finally he resolves to make the attempt. He rises 
to his feet and says, "Behold, Lord, the half of 
my goods I give to the poor ; and if I have taken 
any thing from any man by false accusation, I 
restore him fourfold." (Luke 19. 8.) Jesus 
replies, "This day is salvation come to this house, 
forasmuch as thou also art a son of Abraham." 
"The comfort that the synagogue has denied thee 
is, nevertheless, secured unto thee" by those 
energies of righteousness that lift man into a 
personal communion with God. 



IV 
THE LIGHT OF LIFE 



55 



Christ— The Prince of Life. (Acts 
3. 15.) 

He that followeth after me shall not 
walk in darkness, but shall have the 
light of life. (John 8. 12.) 

I came that they may have life, and 
may have it abundantly. (John 10. 
10, R. V.) 

Go ye, and stand, and speak in the 
temple to the people all the words of 
this life. (Acts 5. 20.) 



56 



IV 

THE LIGHT OF LIFE 

As Interpreted by the Philosophy of Henri 
Bergson 

In the early centuries of her existence the 
Christian church gradually attracted to her fold 
the most intellectual men of the age. The pro- 
found teaching of Christ and his apostles became 
a well of living water that never ran dry. The 
great councils of the church, by the brilliancy of 
their achievements, commanded the respect of 
philosophers and kings. By the fourth century, 
pagan temples were deserted or converted into 
churches, idolatry was renounced, and the Chris- 
tian church enthroned as the religious teacher of 
the world. Then with the decline and fall of the 
Roman empire came an era of gradual mental 
and moral darkness that remained unbroken until 
the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Be- 
cause this reformation transferred the seat of 
divine authority from the Vatican to the Word of 
God, there was required a new and more pro- 
found study of the original sources of truth. 
Again the church became attractive to scholars, 
and there came forth those great thinkers whose 
conclusions have guided the Protestant Church 

57 



58 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

until this day. While we are still living in the 
era of that Reformation, yet during the past fifty 
years the church has been confronted with many 
new and epoch-making events. Our discoveries 
and inventions have enlarged our commercial 
and social visions and quickened our pace. In 
philosophy, evolution has become prominent, and 
in Bible study, the historical method has taken 
the field. The mechanical theory of the universe, 
supplemented by the philosophy based upon 
Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, later devel- 
oped into a theory of both "Organic and Inor- 
ganic" evolution, has been accepted by many as 
the solution of all existence. These fields of 
study have attracted men of large culture, have 
disturbed the faith of many, have developed a 
literature, and have embarrassed the Christian 
church. Now we seem to be standing at the 
dawn of a new era. New voices are heard, new 
interpretations appear, and an astonishing 
change is taking place. The philosophies of 
Bergson and Eucken are the intellectual sensa- 
tions of France, Germany, and England to-day. 
(A philosopher is the man who sees things or 
facts in their relation to principles.) E. Her- 
mann, of England, says: "Bergson and Eucken 
are the most widely discussed philosophers to- 
day." Dr. W. R. Inge, professor of divinity, 
Cambridge, England, describes Eucken as a 
"Genuinely Christian philosopher, who is con- 



THE LIGHT OF LIFE 59 

sidered by many to be the greatest living meta- 
physician in Germany." He adds: "It is long 
since an independent speculative thinker quite of 
the first rank has produced a system so indu- 
bitably Christian as Eucken's." "His books, 
although difficult to read, are being sold by tens 
of thousands of copies." Bergson, College of 
France, Paris, "has the largest lecture room the 
college can boast, but not nearly large enough to 
accommodate the crowds that try to hear him 
every Wednesday. His audiences are made up 
of all nationalities and of all faiths." While 
these men are being heard at these thought 
centers as prophets of inspired visions, it seems 
to be an unpardonable negligence that would 
wrap the mantle of indifference about us as 
though we knew it all already. In attempting to 
give an outline of Bergson's philosophy, I shall 
rely upon two of his greatest books, Time and 
Free Will and Creative Evolution. 

I. Bergson says : "The existence that we know 
best is our own ; but we exist as living beings, not 
as dead matter. The realities of living beings are 
living realities, or realities affecting life. Now 
I find that I pass from state to state. I am warm 
or cold, merry or sad, active or idle. My sensa- 
tions, feelings, volitions, ideas, register these 
changes, and a different register is made every 
moment. My existence is then progressive, and 
is through the years. Things perish, times 



60 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

change, my experiences change, fortunes fluctu- 
ate, but I endure. However, I do not endure as 
a stone, but as a type of living energy that is 
always active. My personality changes without 
ceasing. Every moment is an original moment 
in which creation is active/' The exact outcome 
cannot be foreseen. An artist may have a model 
and paints and his own talents converged upon a 
new piece of creation, but no artist can foresee 
exactly what the portrait will be, for to predict it 
is to produce it before it was produced — an absurd 
hypothesis, which is its own refutation. Even so 
with regard to our life, of which we are artisans, 
every moment of the way modifies our person- 
ality, by which life is formed or deformed, so as 
to give every act an original character. What 
we do depends every moment upon what we are, 
and we are at the moment what we do. This is 
why we cannot deal with life in the abstract, 
from the outside, as in geometry. For a con- 
scious being to exist is to change, to change is to 
mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself 
endlessly. Maturity and old age are attributes 
only of the body. He denies the physico-chem- 
ical character of vital actions. 

II. The universe is an organism, and not a 
huge piece of mechanism; nor is human history 
the product of this machine being run by the 
force of natural law. You cannot put the living 
process into such a mathematical formula. We 



THE LIGHT OF LIFE 61 

cannot calculate concrete living existence by any 
science of the abstract. "We cannot sacrifice 
experience to the requirements of a system." 
He rejects Leibnitz's doctrine of teleology, which 
is that human history is the realization of a pro- 
gramme previously arranged. This is simply the 
mechanical hypothesis inverted, in which it is 
assumed that at the start all is given. The only 
difference is that in the mechanistic view the law 
drives us, while in this, the ultimate purpose 
attracts us. Bergson's philosophy of life claims 
to transcend both mechanism and finalism, but 
is nearer to finalism than to mechanism. Final- 
ism assumes that harmony of the species exists in 
fact. Bergson holds that it exists only in prin- 
ciple, that only the original impulse of life was 
common. The higher we ascend in life, the more 
do diverse tendencies appear complementary to 
each other. In finalism the harmony is behind 
creation in the programme and is secured by an 
impulsion of the Creator, but with Bergson, the 
harmony at last issues in a common aspiration as 
a result of the living, creating process. The Dar- 
winian and Lamarkian theories of evolution are 
rejected by Bergson. 

III. Life is an ascending movement. It en- 
dures the resistance of inert matter and the 
unstable balance of tendencies within itself. It 
makes its appearance first in the vegetable and 
then in the animal. Life in the vegetable is held 



62 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

down below consciousness, but life in the animal 
ascends to the level of consciousness. The more 
the nervous system develops, the more numerous 
and more precise become the movements among 
which the animal can choose, and the clearer also 
is the consciousness that accompanies move- 
ments. In the vegetable, life has fallen asleep; 
in the brute, it is partially awake, but in man life 
takes on a vital energy that carries it trium- 
phantly through inert matter into the life of spir- 
itual reality. Consciousness and mobility here 
attain their highest range. This progressive life 
is a kind of torpor in the vegetable, instinct in 
the animal, and intelligence in man. Bergson 
says: "The cardinal error which, from Aristotle 
onward, has vitiated most of the philosophies of 
nature is to see in vegetative, instinctive, and 
rational life three successive degrees of the de- 
velopment of one and the same tendency, whereas 
they are three divergent directions of an activity 
that has split up as it grew. The difference be- 
tween them is not a difference of intensity, nor 
of degree, but of kind." The vegetable life is 
antagonistic and complementary to the animal 
life; and the instinctive life is complementary to 
the intelligent life. They are complementary to 
each other only because they are different. 
These differences, in the briefest expression, are 
these : 

First. They employ two different methods of 



THE LIGHT OF LIFE 63 

action on inert matter. In searching for the age 
at which man appeared on the earth, no one ques- 
tions the reliability of the testimony borne by dis- 
covered hatchets and other implements that 
declare the presence of human intelligence. 
Mechanical invention is the first essential feature 
of human intelligence. Inventions of artificial 
instruments strew the road of progress over 
which man has traveled. Intelligence, then, is 
defined to be the faculty of manufacturing arti- 
ficial objects, especially tools and machines. 
Now, while instinct cannot make tools out of 
inert matter, it can use the tools given it by 
nature with a skill that transcends intelligence. 
The beaver, the ant, and the bee have a natural 
ability to use an inborn mechanism with an 
efficiency that man cannot equal. At the outset 
the advantage seems to be with instinct. Its 
unerring precision is a constant marvel to intel- 
ligence, but at the end the advantage is clearly 
with intelligence, because intelligence gains a 
larger empire over nature. Broadly speaking, to 
both instinct and intelligence are accorded knowl- 
edge, but the knowledge of instinct is acted and is 
largely unconscious, while the knowledge of 
intelligence is a thought-product and is essen- 
tially conscious. Instinct has also an innate 
knowledge of things, while intelligence must 
come to its knowledge of things by tests and by 
learning. 



64 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

Second. The knowledge of instinct is entirely 
practical and utilitarian, while intellect can go 
beyond the field of practical utility into the field 
of speculation and invention. Here the intelli- 
gent being bears within himself the means to 
transcend his own nature. Bergson says, "The 
understanding must have fallen from heaven 
with its form, as each of us is born with his face." 

Third. While intelligence treats everything 
mechanically, instinct acts organically. Intelli- 
gence guides us into the domain of matter, but 
instinct confines itself to life. Intelligence 
develops science as its instrument of utility in 
the material realm. Here geometry and logic are 
at home. With these instruments the intellect 
has attained great skill in dealing with inert 
matter, but is awkward the moment it touches 
life. Whether it studies the life of the body or 
that of the mind, it finds itself in face of a closed 
door. "The intellect is characterized by a natural 
inability to comprehend life." We have heard a 
good deal about the scientific study of religious 
problems, but Bergson reminds us that science 
has to do with everything except life. It goes 
all around life, but it never enters it. Human 
life can be studied scientifically only after the liv- 
ing body has been likened to a machine. The 
muscles, bones, nerves, cells, veins, and tissues 
are the parts of the machine; the organism is 
their assemblage. Science can go no further. 



THE LIGHT OF LIFE 65 

The old theory that God is the external gov- 
ernor of the universe and runs his moral govern- 
ment by a naturalistic scheme of physical law is 
"the iron gin of mechanism" that destroys man's 
freedom, determines his destiny, and involves 
the problem of pain and of evil in mysterious 
darkness. Mechanism assumes that the mate- 
rials assembled in man are all governed by 
necessary laws, and it never gets man out of the 
narrow circle of necessity. These laws of the 
material man are predicated also of man as a liv- 
ing energy. Bergson contends that here, in the 
realm of life, these old methods will not go. He 
also contends that life has its own process of 
endurance, and that it brings into matter unfore- 
seeable results. Conscious life becomes more 
and more free. Human life becomes a veritable 
reservoir of indetermination. Consciousness 
corresponds exactly to the living being's power 
of choice. "We cannot sacrifice experience to the 
requirements of a system." "Consciousness or 
experience informs us that the majority of our 
actions can be explained by motives, but deter- 
mination here is far from necessary, since com- 
mon sense believes in free will." It is inaccurate 
to say that our actions were determined by sym- 
pathy, or aversion, or hate, as though these were 
forces apart from our life. These feelings are 
forms of living energy that involve the whole 
inner man. Then to say that an act is determined 



66 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

by any one of these feelings is to say that it is 
self-determined. Every act that has the stamp 
of our personality upon it is a free act, by which 
is meant that a contrary act was possible. 
"Freedom is a fact, and among the facts which 
we observe there is none clearer." But if we live 
for the external world rather than for ourselves ; 
live for external business, or for social relation- 
ships, we are rarely free. These external rela- 
tionships are liable to exercise rule or authority 
over us. We look to them for suggestion, for 
motive, for determination. We gain our con- 
sciousness of freedom in those rare moments of 
introspection when we take note of our own state 
of consciousness and put the stamp of our person- 
ality upon our act. 

Fourth. It is life that organizes matter. In- 
stinct coincides with this work of organization, 
but instinct and intelligence are two divergent 
developments of one and the same principle. 
That which is instinctive in instinct, cannot be 
expressed in terms of intelligence. It has the 
same relation to intelligence that vision has to 
touch. Instinct corresponds to vision and intelli- 
gence to touch. 

IV. What instinct is to the bee intuition is to 
man. Bergson says: "By intuition I mean 
instinct that has become disinterested, self-con- 
scious, capable of reflecting upon its object and 
of enlarging it indefinitely." It leads us to the 



THE LIGHT OF LIFE 67 

very inwardness of life. Life, or consciousness, 
may fix its attention on its own movement or on 
the matter it is passing through; as it fixes its 
attention on itself, it develops intuition, and as it 
fixes its attention on matter, it develops intelli- 
gence. Thus intuition and intelligence represent 
two opposite directions of action. Intuition car- 
ries consciousness in the direction of life, but 
intelligence carries it in the direction of inert 
matter. Because man has put the emphasis upon 
the development of intellect, his intuitions have 
been largely sacrificed to intellectual activity. 
We have developed intellect in our conquest of 
the material world, and our consciousness has 
adapted itself to the habits of the material. Intui- 
tion remains with us, but it exists in us as a 
flickering lamp that glimmers now and then and 
only for a few moments at a time. This glimmer- 
ing light enters into consciousness whenever a 
vital interest is at stake, as to our personality, 
as to our liberty, as to our relation to God or as 
to our destiny. It is by this lamp that we see 
light in God's light ; see the dark problems of life 
clear up like a foggy morning at the rising of the 
sun. By this lamp God is seen, not as a king to 
threaten us, nor as a debater to argue us into 
right living, but as light that reveals the path of 
life. This lamp illuminates the third story of 
man's nature, and by its aid man enters into the 
realities of the spiritual life. It is the "highway" 



68 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

of the redeemed, over which Paul ascended to the 
third heaven and became conscious of truth 
known only by revelation. It becomes clear that 
in our meditations, in our worship, and in our 
prayers we must become introspective ; must fix 
our attention upon our relation with God; must 
enter into that spiritual atmosphere that will 
enable this "flickering lamp" to burn with greater 
brilliancy and give aspiration a lighted field. To 
this end the Lord's Day, the sanctuary, the house 
of prayer and worship by spiritual sacrifices 
become absolute necessities. No man can gain 
the rewards of this higher level with his mind 
fixed everlastingly in the direction of inert 
matter or upon the rewards of life on the social 
or intellectual grade. Religion is not a contract 
to be signed with ink and then made matter of 
human record, but it is a divinely related life in 
which we may see light in God's light. Then all 
that elevates life beyond the rational level, all 
that transfigures life upon the summits of aspira- 
tional achievement, all that glorifies life in re- 
deemed manhood, becomes verified in human 
experience. 



THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 



60 



They that are in the flesh cannot 
please God, but ye are not in the flesh, 
but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God 
dwell in you. (Rom. 8. 8, 9.) 

Know ye not that ye are the sanctu- 
ary of God, and that the Spirit of God 
dwelleth in you? (1 Cor. 3. 16.) 

Ye are built up a spiritual house, an 
holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual 
sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus 
Christ. (1 Pet. 2. 5.) 



70 



V 

THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 

As Interpreted by the Philosophy of 
R. Eucken 

We are living in an age of strenuous exertion. 
It is a "work age." The output of labor was 
never so great. The products of our material 
civilization never had such markets. Stupen- 
dous enterprises are under way. The possibilities 
of our business and commercial enterprises have 
become all-absorbing. Every known energy is 
being directed to this utilitarian end. Money 
production has become the measure of utility. A 
man's worth to society is measured by his salary 
or income. The incessant demand for more 
money shows the unsatisfied thirst of everybody. 
The result is a condition of unrest such as was 
never known. This absorption of human energy 
is draining off our vitality to the danger point. 
Men come to the Lord's Day weary, worn, and 
sad. Then recreation for health receives the first 
consideration. Spiritual realities and their values 
are ignored or not seen. Churches stand half 
empty while the people, in crowds, wander 
abroad as sheep without a shepherd and faint by 

the way. In addition to this, one of the most 

7* 



72 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

serious causes of our present embarrassment in 
thought-centers is the fact stated by Dr. Horton, 
of London. It is that the old mechanical theory of 
the universe has at last broken down. Science no 
longer boasts that it can interpret the universe 
in terms of mechanism. Its efforts in that direc- 
tion are acknowledged by its friends "to be pretty 
well played out." Dr. Horton adds : "It is impos- 
sible to find any reputable thinker to support the 
idea any longer." (The Christian World Pulpit, 
June, 19 1 2, p. 380.) Because this mechanical 
theory of the universe formed the foundation of 
much current theology that is now being laid 
on the shelf, a consciousness of bewilderment 
exists in many circles of the Christian ministry. 
Any preacher who is keeping in touch with pres- 
ent currents of religious thought knows what is 
here meant. 

At this crisis, God seems to have called forth 
his prophet anew. Like all of God's prophets, 
he comes from unexpected quarters. Eucken, of 
Jena, Germany, now sixty-six years of age, has 
been described by Dr. Horton as the greatest liv- 
ing thinker we have. His insight into the real- 
ities of the Spiritual Life has already made him a 
teacher of teachers. It may be presumptuous in 
me to undertake this review of his teaching, after 
studying only 720 pages of his writing, but I 
simply must do it. The situation is too serious 
and the unrest too great to permit silence. 



THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 73 

I. The old solutions of life's problem are first 
reviewed. The old religious idea of God as a 
transcendental Spiritual King whose wrath is 
more in evidence than his love is repudiated. 
Under this conception, Eucken asserts that "reli- 
gious reformation often issues in a grievous 
deformation." That our own world, which 
envelops us with its wondrous wealth of vitality, 
should be made to depend upon an alien system, 
the very existence of which is problematic, may 
well seem the height of absurdity. Religion in 
that traditional and ecclesiastic form is for man 
to-day a question rather than an answer. The 
consolidation of Christianity into Catholicism 
tended to make the church rather a harbor of 
refuge from the world than an agency of moral 
regeneration and progress. Ecclesiasticism 
nearly strangled ethics, and the church made a 
series of deadly compromises with the lower 
levels of human nature. Healthy freedom was 
almost destroyed, until it burst its bonds at the 
Reformation. Christianity has swayed back- 
ward and forward between world-conquest and 
world-renunciation, between practical ethics and 
cloistered sanctity. The old Greek idealism is 
commended as a method of culture, but rejected 
as a substitute for religion, because it fails to 
reward man with the realities of the spiritual 
life. Modern subjectivism is rejected because it 
treats spiritual values as of slight or secondary 



74 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

importance. The modern effort to shift life's 
interest from the invisible world has been very 
successful. It has gone forward with a total 
disregard of religious obligations or claims. Its 
gigantic and elaborate organizations are per- 
fectly indifferent to the workman's moral wel- 
fare, because he is regarded as only a tool — 
a tool endowed with the property of conscious- 
ness, to be retained or cast aside purely as a 
matter of utility. A deep dissatisfaction is devel- 
oped that drives men into counter organizations 
or into the dreams of socialistic Utopias. Natu- 
ralism is condemned because by it religion is 
doomed, along with justice and morality. It 
drives man to negation and despair. Men who 
rely entirely upon thought-culture will find that 
finally, instead of being the masters of thought, 
the reverse takes place. By the strength of 
thought-currents men are borne forward to 
issues that quite contradict their own interests. 

II. Eucken says : "The point at issue — the cru- 
cial point of the whole argument — is whether 
man can inwardly transcend this world and, in 
so doing, alter fundamentally his relation to 
reality. This is the great crux which our present 
civilization has to face. The only possible 
remedy is to radically alter the conception of man 
himself, to distinguish within him the narrower 
and the larger life, a finite and an infinite life. 
In this higher range, Eucken finds man blessed 



THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 75 

with a moral consciousness and the power of 
initiative, with originality and variety, with free- 
dom and freshness, with mobility and richness, 
by which he shares the energies and emotions of 
universal life, or the cosmic life. Here life takes 
on a vastness and richness of possibility that is 
everywhere else denied man. He escapes the 
depressing influences of the mechanical routine 
and the conventionalities of custom, and enters 
into that independence that reveals moral 
strength and sets aspiration free. Here man is 
no longer a mere cog in the wheel of a mechan- 
ical progress, nor a mere part of nature that con- 
ditions his thought, because he is lifted above the 
natural into the spiritual realm. The natural life 
becomes not man's master, but the servant of a 
spiritual authority. Experiences of the natural, 
or sense experiences, are inferior to experiences 
of the supernatural. The consciousness of a 
divine living vitality of truth revolutionizes 
the old order, and man lives in the realm of 
ideas rather than of things. Here life tran- 
scends its mere external connections with nature 
because it has touched the springs of a higher 
vitality. Life is no longer molded in conformity 
with the old material standards of propriety, nor 
does it, like science, adopt a mere external vision 
of man, because the mainspring of his activity is 
aspiration that is satisfied only with thorough- 
ness and clearness. Here we find that for the 



76 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

discernment of spiritual truth we have a faculty 
which, in its sphere, is as much to be trusted as 
the organs of sensation in their sphere. The 
spiritual life develops its own kingdom, by its 
own energies, from its own standpoint. Its real- 
ities or truths are unaffected by the chance and 
change of human conditions, or by the differences 
and discords of individuals. It springs from 
a deeper source than man's individual nature. 
It introduces a new stage of reality in contradis- 
tinction from that of nature. It has behind it a 
spiritual world from which it draws its powers 
and its credentials. The spiritual life is thus 
exalted above all that is merely natural. It thus 
asserts its independence of the natural life and 
has an intrinsically universal nature. It does not 
consist in an external connection with another 
world, but is rather our union with a spiritual 
world. Two worlds meet within us, and a con- 
flict follows, but the spiritual life makes us 
superior to all human frailties, and has the power 
to overrule all human ends. It holds us to the 
ideals of duty and animates our activity. It 
imposes a certain compulsion upon us, though 
this compulsion is not from without, but has its 
seat in our own spiritual life. "The kingdom of 
God is within you. ,, Spiritual values are also 
distinct from all considerations of mere pleasure 
and utility. They are ours and yet more than 
ours. For example, on the natural level of life, 



THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 77 

justice is a reality that protects my rights as a 
citizen, but it exists apart from me, in the arm of 
the law. I resort to it as a thing of utility. I 
live with it in terms of an external righteousness. 
But when I am elevated to the level of the spir- 
itual life, justice becomes an attribute of my own 
nature. It becomes mine as a form of divine life 
in me. It feeds me, quickens me, and molds my 
character. It compels me to see life from its own 
standpoint; will not permit me to change the 
existing condition of things ; it ignores the inter- 
ests of selfishness, because it is in me as a divine 
authority that transcends all considerations of 
expediency. God thus makes man his own. The 
same is true of righteousness, mercy, truth, char- 
ity, and love. These divine attributes here take 
on flesh and blood. Man's conduct is no longer 
imposed upon him from without, but man's life 
is regulated from within, that to the outer world 
appears as self-control. Man here attains to a 
new, rich, and true personality. Here he 
triumphs in himself, over himself, and becomes 
independent of the whole surrounding world. 
That is, he is no longer dependent upon custom, 
nor upon conventionality, nor upon human likes 
and fancies, because he lives by the inspiration of 
a higher world. 

III. On the natural level of life the whole social 
and business world is stimulated to action by 
motives of a native selfishness that dictate all 



78 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

man's activities. The spiritual life effects our 
emancipation from this bondage and initiates 
that divine energy that is made manifest in 
charity, in love, and in philanthropic enterprises. 
Our native selfishness gives way to make room 
for those broader activities and sacrifices that 
the spiritual life demands. Here we recognize 
a divinity in man that transforms him into a 
new creature and elevates him above his former 
level. 

IV. To give our activity a personal stamp, free- 
dom is essential to it. It thus becomes our own 
act instead of having been assigned to us by 
nature or by destiny. Thus freedom of initiative 
carries with it the consciousness of personal 
responsibility. By this freedom man escapes the 
heel of a cosmic fatalism; he is something more 
than a cog in the wheel of nature, whose events 
are products of natural laws. In the mechanico- 
causal conception of nature, freedom is quite out 
of place, but science deals only with things, and 
here we are dealing with life. One fundamental 
fact of the spiritual life is its spontaneity and 
power of initiative. Herein it reveals its inde- 
pendence of the natural order. Instead of taking 
second place, where science puts it, we find it 
taking first place. Such a life is no mere evolu- 
tion in the sense that the later event grows surely 
and inevitably out of the earlier. On the con- 
trary, the gains of the past and its contributions 



THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 79 

to the present are, spiritually considered, nothing 
more than possibilities whose actualization waits 
upon our own decision and initiative. 

V. In the natural life there is a disposition to 
lower all culture to the level of one's interests and 
to replace quality by quantity. Paltry meanness 
and embroidered selfishness, idle self-absorption, 
and the craving to be conspicuous at all costs 
become manifest. A reckless spirit of aggres- 
siveness, a repulsive hypocrisy, a lack of moral 
courage, and the busiest of industry when per- 
sonal advantage is to be secured, are prominent 
characteristics of the merely natural life — char- 
acteristics that are distressing society to-day. 
Now the spiritual life transcends the natural 
life at all these points. Here spiritual values 
become superior to sense values. While the 
natural man struggles by the aid of vague im- 
pulses at the performance of spiritual functions, 
the man under the control of the spiritual 
life escapes this vacillation and triumphs over 
the opposition. His life is enriched in thought, 
is purified in affection, is exalted in motive, and 
is empowered in will. The inward level of life 
is thus raised and life is blessed with a richer 
content. 

VI. To the spiritual life it is essential that the 
higher Power in our midst should be, not merely 
an influence, but a living Presence, and that our 
relationship to this Presence should not be just 



80 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

any sort of relation, but one in which our whole 
nature is involved. Only a Power that is not of 
this world can guard us from the perils of an 
alien and hostile order. The tides of adversity 
swept over the prophets and left them undis- 
turbed because they were borne forward by a 
counter force that secured achievement and made 
them superior to the fluctuations of the passing 
moment. The very fact that this movement of 
the spiritual life-tide persists amid all obstacles, 
never slackening nor desponding, is sure evi- 
dence that here we have to do with a Power that 
acts independently of all human caprice. 

VII. Life here does not depend upon knowl- 
edge, but knowledge depends upon life. We 
could not begin to work out our own salvation if 
God w r ere not already working in us. It is 
always in his light that we see light. The victory 
over doubt is not won through mere reflection, 
but through the inward shaping of life itself. 
Because our life is so weak and so empty, our 
doubts succeed in depressing us as they do. 
What is required to banish doubt is the rejuvena- 
tion of our inner life. It follows that however 
reason may triumph over the natural world, this 
natural world is not the whole of reality, but that 
it is a mere section of it. We are in error when 
we imagine that our material prosperity, com- 
fort, and happiness is the supreme end of life, 
and that the main criteria of a happy life are 



THE SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF LIFE 81 

success and ease. It becomes more and more 
clear that the supreme end of life is its inward sta- 
bility and progress, a deepening of character, 
a flowing out of the divinity that is within us. 
Here our life gains a goal that is not to be 
hidden by the interests of our natural life, 
nor fatally obstructed by the difficulties that this 
world strews in our path. The fellowship of 
Christ's suffering does more to deepen, develop, 
and enrich the spiritual life than do the still 
waters and green pastures that we constantly 
desire. Our progress is anything rather than a 
peaceful unfolding of the spiritual life. There is 
demanded of us a ceaseless struggle to maintain 
the purity of motive, the divinity of our affection, 
and the elevation of our nature. A life thus 
maintained is the most heroic that is witnessed 
beneath the stars. 



VI 



NATURAL LAW VERSUS SPIRITUAL 

LAW 



83 



I delight in the law of God after 
the inward man : but I see a different 
law in my members, warring- against 
the law of my mind, and bringing me 
into captivity to the law of sin. (Rom. 
7. 22, 23.) 

The law of the Spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus made me free from the law of 
sin and death. (Rom. 8. 2.) 

Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at 
my tribulations for you, which are 
your glory. For this cause I bow my 
knees unto the Father . . . that he 
would grant you, according to the 
riches of his glory, that ye may be 
strengthened with power through his 
Spirit in the inward man. (Eph. 3. 
13-16.) 



VI 

NATURAL LAW VERSUS SPIRITUAL 
LAW 

I. Paul had been trained in the Oriental habit 
of introspection that required only the touch of 
divine inspiration to make him an expert reader 
of the states of human consciousness. This class 
of facts is presented by him with a skill that 
never has been excelled. Because of this clear 
discrimination he continues to be the teacher of 
the world with reference to the complex energies 
of human life. We are familiar with his declara- 
tions concerning "the outward man" and "the 
inward man" (2 Cor. 4. 16), "the natural man" 
and "the spiritual man" (1 Cor. 2. 14), the 
"carnal mind" and "the spiritual understand- 
ing" (Col. 1. 19), and that "the sensual man has 
not the Spirit." (Jude 19.) It follows that a 
sensual life can lay no claim to a spiritual life, 
that the carnal mind is denied spiritual under- 
standing, and that the life of the outward man is 
very different from the life of the inward man. 
The life of the outward, or natural man, has to do 
with food and digestion, with health and vital 
energy, with the acquisitions of material com- 
forts and with the development of social instincts. 

Upon the other hand, the life of the inward 

85 



86 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

man has to do with mental and moral develop- 
ment for its own sake. This involves a develop- 
ment of all the attributes of personality, the 
supremacy of aspiration over ambition, an 
enrichment in character rather than in goods, 
and a distinct subordination of the ideals that 
control life on the natural level to those ideals that 
control life on the higher spiritual level. The 
spiritual man must be equipped to live under the 
control of ethics rather than under the control of 
his material interests. On the lower level, life 
is simply a means to an alien end. Here man 
heaps up riches and knows not who shall gather 
them. On the upper level, life is an end in itself. 
Here, the aim is to enrich life by becoming a 
partaker of God's own nature with its regenerat- 
ing efficiency. Here, the ideal life is the real life, 
the full and complete life, of which all lives that 
fall short of it are only imitations. These two 
forms of life move in divergent directions, have 
different aims, different interests, and different 
results. 

Again. We are familiar with Paul's teach- 
ing that the spiritual life has its own law of 
progress and development, and that the natural 
life develops under "a different law" (Rom. 7. 
22, 23) ; that the natural law has its seat in the 
flesh, while the spiritual law has its throne in the 
mind. He also discovers that the process of 
growth by the natural law is more difficult to 



NATURAL VS. SPIRITUAL LAW 87 

defeat than the process of growth by the spir- 
itual law. A little child grows to the size of 
a man in spite of his will, but by the mold- 
ing power of an alien environment, or by the 
power of will, the spiritual attributes of hu- 
manity may remain in childish feebleness in 
full-grown men. In such cases the antagonism 
of the two laws is reduced to a minimum. The 
carnal mind gains such complete supremacy over 
the spiritual mind that the man's spiritual energy 
is almost an unconscious quality. But in Paul 
we have a man whose spiritual life-tide was care- 
fully directed in its first flow; that is, when the 
consciousness of right and wrong, and of the 
divine authority of duty first came into childhood, 
as a spring in the desert. Because this spring of 
the spiritual life had a parental guardianship, the 
wilderness of Paul's life had been enriched by 
a spiritual content in his early youth that always 
stood out like an evergreen oasis. When his 
physical and mental growth had been set aflame 
by the ambitions and competitions of life on the 
lower level, there had been a corresponding 
depression of his spiritual consciousness, and it 
is then that the apostle finds in him these two 
laws as two types of active energy. He finally 
discovers that by his misplaced emphasis he has 
subordinated his spiritual life to his carnal life, 
so that when he would act in obedience to the 
law of the spiritual, he finds himself controlled 



88 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

by the law of the carnal life. He finds that in 
obedience to the lower law, he carries into prac- 
tice what his judgment and his conscience con- 
demns. He finally cries out, "O wretched man 
that I am ! who shall deliver me out of the body 
of this death ?" ( Rom. 7. 24. ) 

II. In the year 1884, Henry Drummond pub- 
lished a book entitled Natural Law in the Spirit- 
ual World, but which should have been entitled 
Spiritual Law in the Natural World (which he 
himself is reported to have admitted). It was an 
attempt to show by analogy that our natural life 
and our spiritual life are both under the reign of 
one and the same universal natural law. Omit- 
ting his analogical argument, which I think 
breaks down, I find in his work striking passages 
that support the Pauline teaching. Drummond 
says: "It may seem an obvious objection [to his 
position] that many of the natural laws have no 
connection whatever with the spiritual world, 
and, as a matter of fact, are not continued 
through it." He cites the law of gravitation, 
which is overcome by the "plant, which rises in 
the air during the process of growth." He adds : 
"It does this in virtue of a higher law and in 
apparent defiance of the lower." "There is 
a principle of growth, or vitality, at work super- 
seding the attraction of gravity." "Is it not evi- 
dent that each kingdom of nature has its own set 
of laws, which continue possibly untouched for 



NATURAL VS. SPIRITUAL LAW 89 

the specific kingdom, but never extend beyond 
it?" "It is quite true that when we pass from 
the inorganic to the organic kingdom, we come 
to a new set of laws." "The passage from the 
mineral world to the plant or animal world is 
hermetically sealed on the mineral side. The 
inorganic world is staked off from the living 
world by barriers which have never yet been 
crossed from within. No change of substance, 
no modification of environment, no chemistry, no 
electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any 
evolution can endow any single atom of the min- 
eral world with the attribute of life. Only by 
bending down into this dead world of some liv- 
ing form can these dead atoms be gifted with 
the properties of vitality." "It is a very mysteri- 
ous law which guards, in this way, the portals of 
the living world." (Page 68.) "In the vision 
of the spiritual world presented in the Word of 
God, the first thing that strikes the eye is a great 
gulf fixed. The passage from the natural to the 
spiritual world is hermetically sealed on the 
natural side. The door from the inorganic to the 
organic is shut; no mineral can open it; so the 
door from the natural to the spiritual is shut, 
and no man can open it." (Page 71.) "The 
Natural Man belongs essentially to this present 
order of things." (Page 82.) 

III. Eucken finds that the spiritual life is quite 
independent of the natural life; that the two 



9 o THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

realms are as distinct as are two alien kingdoms. 
He says: "Nature brutally ignores spiritual 
interests and drives her chariot of destruction 
over the very Christ of God. In the world of 
men wrong triumphs and unspiritual ends de- 
grade spiritual powers. The life of the Spirit 
can be interpreted neither in terms of mechanism 
nor in terms of logic. It is an independent spir- 
itual reality which brings its own demands to ex- 
istence and reconstitutes it according to its own 
standards. Thus, embracing and reshaping 
reality, it clearly cannot be derived from nature, 
for nothing can be transformed by a power hav- 
ing its fulcrum within that thing; the point of 
control must lie beyond it. To choose a spiritual 
life which must be maintained in an unspiritual 
world of contradictions and tyrannies is possible 
only on the assumption that the spiritual life 
has its roots outside and beyond this world." 
(Eucken's Philosophy of Life, by E. Hermann, 
pp. 60-62.) 

IV. Horace Bushnell taught that above the 
natural life there exists the supernatural; that 
the supernatural realm represents a higher 
system of life and of law than the natural; that 
the laws of the spiritual life are higher than the 
laws of things. Christianity is supernatural 
because it acts regeneratively and new creatively 
to repair the damage of natural law in its penal 
action. (Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 38, 



NATURAL VS. SPIRITUAL LAW 91 

42, 43.) "Man is vitally related to a divinity that 
is above him, in him, about him. He is therefore 
inspirable by God, is able to receive his impulse, 
able to enter into his movement, to rest in his 
ends, and to be finally perfected in his joys." 
(Bushnell, Sermons of the New Life, p. 35.) 

As a personality, in the spiritual realm man 
takes on the "power of an endless life/* (Heb. 
7. 16.) His consciousness, memory, imagina- 
tion, conscience, and will insure his progress 
forever. Self-consciousness registers our en- 
richment in knowledge. Memory brings up 
the enrichments of the past into the present. 
Conscience conducts us like a guardian angel 
upon the pathway of ethics that grows brighter 
and brighter until the perfect day. The imagina- 
tion that so nearly relates man to God, in creative 
energy, brings into our consciousness those ideals 
that reward inspiration with permanent values. 
Here the will becomes an executive energy that 
promises to expand man's empire forever. 

V. Man's redemption requires the supremacy 
of the spiritual law over the natural law. To this 
end God invites us into his council chamber, 
where he informs the reason, enlightens the con- 
science, reveals duty, and then appeals to our 
moral sense and aspirational nature, with the 
assurance that any degree of degeneration can- 
not defeat the redemptive energy of the spiritual 
law. (Isa. 1. 18.) Here the reins of our per- 



92 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

sonal government are transferred from natural 
law to spiritual law. (Rom. 8. 2.) Now I am 
exhorted to "walk in the Spirit." to "be led by the 
Spirit" (Gal. 5, 16, 18), to place myself under 
the reign of the Spirit (Rom. 6. 12), not because 
God commands it, but because "the flesh lusteth 
against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the 
flesh: and these are contrary the one to the 
other." (Gal. 5. 17.) Here we come under 
the authority of wisdom, and not of force. 

Then the character of each law is known by its 
fruits. Natural law, having its seat in the flesh, 
brings into harvest "adultery, fornication, un- 
cleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, ha- 
tred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, sedi- 
tions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, 
revelings, and such like" (Gal. 5. 19, 20) that 
exclude men from the kingdom of God. Upon the 
other hand, the tree of life, grown on the spiritual 
level, brings into harvest "love, joy, peace, long- 
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
and self-control." (Gal. 5. 22.) These fruits are 
not simply ornaments of life; they are types of 
living energy. For example, the hatred of 
enemies is characteristic of the natural man; 
retaliation is his impulse and revenge is his desire. 
But Christ requires the spiritual man to restrain 
his vengeance, to do good for evil, to bestow 
blessing for cursing and love for hatred. By the 
ascendency of a redeemed personality Christ 



NATURAL VS. SPIRITUAL LAW 93 

would redeem all human life from its littleness, 
from its sordid selfishness, from its helpless 
injustice, and from its low animal degradations. 
Again. On the natural level salvation becomes 
the reward of merit. Here, whatsoever a man 
sows that shall he also reap. This is the natural 
law. But on the spiritual level salvation is of 
grace. Here I reap what I have not sown. The 
law of the spiritual life repairs the damage that 
I suffered on the lower level. While the issue of 
the natural law is death, the issue of the spiritual 
law is life. Because all religions of merit project 
the natural law into the spiritual world, they 
come to the conviction that God's rewards are 
limited by our merits. We may expect just what 
we deserve. This makes God exacting, harsh, 
severe. Here the wages of sin is death, because 
justice is untempered with mercy. But on life's 
spiritual level God becomes warmly reciprocal, 
is touched with the feelings of our infirmities and 
with the embarrassed struggles of our aspira- 
tional nature. Here, God takes us at our prayer 
value, and what we want to be is counted for 
character. We see this exemplification of mercy 
in God's treatment of the publican, who prayed, 
"God be merciful to me, a sinner." Upon the 
natural level Christ meets certain blind men who, 
according to the rewards of the natural law, are 
reaping what they have sown, but they pray for 
"mercy," and in harmony with the spiritual law, 



94 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

Christ blesses them with what they have not 
sown. Sight and salvation constitute the reward. 
(Matt. 20. 30-34.) 

Again. On the natural level a man's life con- 
sists in the abundance of the things that he 
possesses: in riches, in honors, in social distinc- 
tions, and in acquisitions of power. While these 
things gratify ambitions, they are all external to 
the man. They as often unmake as they make 
character. On the other hand, on the spiritual 
level a man's life does not consist in the things 
acquired, but in those attainments that enrich 
personality. These are enrichments in wisdom, 
in honor, in human sympathy, in charity, and 
in fidelity to duty. These become sources of 
inspiration that give to life a spiritual content. 
Here, men live out of foolishness into wisdom, 
out of meanness into honor, out of selfishness 
into charity, out of fraud into honesty, out of 
hypocrisy into purity of motive. Here are the 
pure in heart, and they see God. Man sees light 
in God's light. Conscience is awake and holds 
the reins of personal government. Love rises 
from a passion (amor) into a divine attribute 
(agapa). Duty becomes heroic and counts no 
sacrifice of the lower values of life too dear a 
price for the higher values. 

To Judas Iscariot thirty pieces of silver con- 
stituted a greater reward than honor or fidelity 
to duty. The moment he had grasped the money, 



NATURAL VS. SPIRITUAL LAW 95 

meanness came into his consciousness and honor 
fled. Then his conscience conducted a revolt 
against him and drove him into despair. When 
he compared what he had lost with what he had 
gained, he flung his money away as trash, but his 
meanness clung to him. Then he flung his very 
life away as an intolerable burden, and then some 
fallen angel conducted him to "his own place" 
(Acts 1. 25) in the abode of the lost. 

Upon the higher spiritual level, the Scriptures 
group the heroic spirits of a triumphant vitality. 
These form a great cloud of witnesses to the 
glorious issues of the spiritual life. These are 
the men who "subdued kingdoms, wrought right- 
eousness, obtained the fulfillment of God's prom- 
ises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the 
violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, 
out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant 
in fight, and turned to flight the armies of aliens." 
(Heb. 11. 33, 34.) Where the natural life fails 
and perishes, the spiritual life is triumphant and 
is glorified for evermore. 



VII 
INDIVIDUALISM 



97 



The word of the Lord came unto 
me, saying, What mean ye that ye 
use this proverb . . . The fathers have 
eaten sour grapes, and the children's 
teeth are set on edge? As I live, saith 
the Lord God, ye shall not have oc- 
casion any more to use this proverb 
in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; 
as the soul of the father, so also the 
soul of the son is mine; the soul that 
sinneth, it shall die. The son shall 
not bear the iniquity of the father, 
neither shall the father bear the iniq- 
uity of the son. Repent, and turn 
yourselves from all your transgres- 
sions; so iniquity shall not be your 
ruin. (Ezek. 18. 1-4, 20, 30.) 



98 



VII 

INDIVIDUALISM 

To the devout Jew, God was always a reality, 
Revelation a fact, the Law his rule of conduct, 
and Redemption his hope. In his early history 
his faith found little expression beyond this 
except in prayer and in times of distress, when 
faith sought for consolation in God's sympathetic 
attitude toward the oppressed, or in his severity 
in punishment of the wicked. As the family 
expanded into a tribe, and the tribe into a nation, 
new conditions, new necessities, and new embar- 
rassments were met from time to time by new 
revelations and new laws. The God of Israel 
became a very present help in times of trouble. 
His prophets became the channels through which 
the people looked for some new message of help 
and of hope. One of these advanced periods of 
revelation appears in the prophecies of Jeremiah 
and Ezekiel. (Jer. 31. 29, 30; Ezek. 18. 1-4, 20, 
30.) Many of the people are in Babylonish 
exile. Whether at home or abroad, they have 
been taught that their fathers suffered on account 
of the sins of Jeroboam, and that the inhabitants 
of Judah are suffering because Ahaz, Ma- 
nasseh, Amon, and others of their fathers had 
sinned. (Jer. 15. 3-6.) In Palestine God had 

99 



ioo THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

planted Israel as "the choicest vine"; he had 
fenced it, gathered out the stones, built towers 
for the watchmen, and had erected a wall about 
it for safety. Then he looked that it should bring 
forth grapes, good fruit — justice, righteousness, 
truth, and fidelity to moral obligations ; but it had 
brought forth wild grapes — oppression and a 
cry, covetousness and lasciviousness, revelry and 
drunkenness, greed and graft. (Isa. 5. 1-7.) 
The idolatry encouraged by their fathers had 
come to harvest in the captivity and sufferings of 
their children. The national conviction had been 
crystallized into this proverb, "The fathers have 
eaten sour grapes and their children's teeth are 
set on edge." There had developed a popular 
complaint against God for permitting the chil- 
dren to suffer for the sins of the fathers. Their 
complaint is that God's ways are not equal, not 
fair, not just. 

I. The chief reliances of the Jews for divine 
favor were three. The first was obedience to 
God's law. (Deut. 26. 16-19.) The worshiper 
found his consolation in being able to say, "I have 
hearkened to the voice of the Lord my God, and 
have done according to all that thou hast com- 
manded me." (Deut. 26. 14.) Their second 
reliance was the merit of the fathers, in addition 
to their own. Especially did they believe that the 
merits of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob had 
"a protective and an atoning influence with God." 



INDIVIDUALISM 101 

(Exod. 32. 13, 14.) "One Rabbi gets so exalted 
at the thought of the Zachuth (the merits) of 
the fathers that he exclaims, Blessed are the chil- 
dren whose fathers have a Zachuth, because they 
profit by their Zachuth; blessed are Israel, who 
can rely upon their Zachuth which saved them." 
(Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, p. 174, 
by S. Scheichter.) The merits of the fathers 
retained its hold upon Jewish faith "as a foun- 
tain of grace on which the nation could rely at 
all times." "Your Zachuth will never end." 
( S. Scheichter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theol- 
ogy, pp. 180, 181.) The decalogue was inter- 
preted in harmony with this teaching. While the 
iniquity of the fathers was visited upon their 
children to the third and fourth generations, yet 
the mercy shown unto those fathers who feared 
God and kept his commandments endured unto 
their children five hundred times as long as the 
punishment. The Rabbis taught that by a re- 
ligious act a man acquired merit for himself 
and for his posterity until the end of all gen- 
erations. (Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, 
p. 182.) 

Their third reliance for divine favor was in 
their being a part of the congregational, or 
national unit. The sin-offering was made "to 
bear the iniquity of the congregation." (Lev. 
10. 17.) The anointed priest made an atonement 
"for all the people of the congregation." (Num. 



102 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

16. 3.) To be cut off from the congregation was 
to be cast forth into regions of despair and death. 
(Num. 19. 20; Judg. 21. 5.) David therefore 
fervently exclaims, "In the midst of the congre- 
gation will I praise thee." (Psa. 22. 22.) 

With these reliances magnified beyond their 
intent, these Jews now think that they are being 
persecuted rather than punished. Persecution 
usually makes men sullen and obstinate, unable to 
see their own faults or their true relation to pres- 
ent results. The prophets are calling for re- 
pentance, but the people do not see the need nor 
advantage of repentance, because they believe 
that they are suffering only for the sins of their 
fathers. Ezekiel and Jeremiah attempt to stem 
this tide of retrogression by the proclamation of 
a new revelation. There emerges the fact of 
man's individual responsibility before God. The 
philosophy of this progressive revelation is very 
clear. 

It becomes evident that God's moral govern- 
ment should be studied with reference to the unit 
with which he has to deal. In the patriarchal age 
all dealing of civil and divine authority was with 
the family unit. The head of the family was held 
accountable for the conduct of every member. If 
the family became disobedient to the law, the 
head of the family was punished for it. If he 
became too weak to govern the family, then a 
stronger than he must be chosen to take his place. 



INDIVIDUALISM 103 

When the unit became a tribe, as in the wilder- 
ness, then God dealt with the leader of that tribe. 
By holding Moses to an account, God held all 
Israel. When the unit became national, the 
kings were made the representatives of this 
larger unit. In this great unit obedience or dis- 
obedience became national rather than individual. 
When Nebuchadnezzar deposed King Jehoi- 
achin and carried him captive to Babylon, he 
took with him the best men of Judah. On account 
of the duplicity of her kings, Judah continued to 
supply Babylon with captives, until only the 
weaker and inferior part of the population 
remained. Now only because the good men were 
a part of the national unit, they suffered as the 
nation suffered. The same principle is active to 
this day. As we form a part of the unit of the 
family or nation, we suffer as individuals because 
the family or nation suffers. 

Again. The larger the family or nation, other 
things being equal, the more liable is the degen- 
eration of the unit. A large nation, as compared 
with a small one on equal footing, has more law- 
breakers and more criminals than a small nation. 
If this degeneration be widely extended, the very 
large unit finally breaks down of its own weight. 
When the individuals of moral worth and 
strength become a minority, they are liable to be 
carried down by tides of evil that are too strong 
for them. This is just what happened to Israel. 



io 4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

This is the reason we find prophets, Ezras and 
Daniels, among the captives of Judah. 

II. It is only after the national unit has been 
broken up that Ezekiel and Jeremiah get this 
revelation of individualism that is destined to 
be a prominent feature of God's moral govern- 
ment for all time. In their exile the Jews were 
released from their national unit and represented 
only their individual standing before God. 
Many of them gave up in despair, but the 
stronger wills made the best of their conditions 
and triumphed in the development of their indi- 
viduality. Daniel became conspicuous for his 
fidelity to every sacred trust ; recognized his indi- 
vidual responsibility to duty, cultivated the spirit 
of personal dependence upon God, supported his 
moral convictions with an adequate courage, and 
became victorious in spite of discouraging en- 
vironments. 

Examples such as this can be easily multiplied, 
but there is another important truth here that 
does not lie so clearly upon the surface. It is 
generally presumed that the development of a 
strong individualism runs counter to the develop- 
ment of society; that the social unit is more 
important than the individual, and that it is my 
duty to seek my own welfare in the welfare of 
society. It is demanded when we enter into the 
corporate units of business or of the state that 
we subordinate our individualism to the larger 



INDIVIDUALISM 105 

unit. The success of these larger units depends 
upon the sacrifice of individual ambitions for the 
corporate good. It is in this association that we 
must love our neighbor as ourselves. This prin- 
ciple holds all the way from a baseball team to the 
state and to the church. No individual of the 
team is tolerated if he be concerned only in his 
own personal achievements. He must frequently 
sacrifice himself for the success of the team. 
Likewise, when the welfare of the state becomes 
subordinate to the personal welfare of her law- 
makers, embarrassments are created for the 
larger unit. Men suffer on account of other 
people's sins, in spite of their goodness and inno- 
cence. 

Again. The dominating power of our times is 
commercialism. The spirit of commercialism is 
the spirit of competition expressed in terms of 
selfishness. The interests of capital discount the 
interests of labor. The capitalist feels himself 
to be superior to the wage-worker and thinks he 
has a superior claim to the world. To preserve 
this claim, the capitalist compels the poor man to 
work on his terms or starve. The necessities of 
the poor are supposed to be only a fraction of 
the necessities of the rich. The rich find much 
of their comfort in the humiliations of the poor, 
and the poor find a good part of their wretched- 
ness in the efforts of the rich to emphasize the 
contrasts of their conditions. Robert Louis 



io6 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

Stevenson is described as one of the most charm- 
ing and majestic men of his age and was given 
a cordial welcome everywhere. One day he 
determined to learn for himself the attitude of 
the rich toward the poor. He attired himself in 
a workman's blouse and walked through the sub- 
urban part of London. He is reported as say- 
ing, "My height seemed to decrease with every 
woman who passed me, for she passed me like she 
passed a dog." Many rich find their problems of 
consolation solved in the glory of the contrast. 

But how is this problem to be solved by those 
poor (not the wasteful and improvident poor) 
who are made and kept poor by their necessities 
and lack of opportunity? When Christ walked 
over the roads of Palestine, he met very many 
poor who were reduced to the necessity of asking 
for alms. They were then living under a Roman 
government, but in the earlier days of her 
national life the Jews did much to prevent such 
poverty. By the institution of the sabbatical 
year and the year of jubilee, the purpose was to 
prevent poverty by land-grabbing, and to give 
every man a fair chance for an honorable liveli- 
hood. "Those who increase the price of food by 
artificial means, who give false measure, who 
lend on usury, and keep back the corn from the 
market, are classed by the rabbis with the blas- 
phemers and hypocrites, and God will never 
forget their works." (Some Aspects of Rabbinic 



INDIVIDUALISM 107 

Theology, p. 113.) Under Gentile rule these 
moral restraints upon the greed of commercial- 
ism are ignored, but in every age and in every 
land those worthy poor who have been denied 
the consolations of a material prosperity have 
sought the consolations of a spiritual life in the 
fellowship of the Christian church. It is only in 
this divinely created unit that we can find a com- 
plete synthesis of individualism and the congre- 
gational unit. To this larger unit God "gives 
some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some 
evangelists, some pastors, some teachers, some 
counselors, and some helpers, that all may attain 
to the full stature of Christian manhood." (Eph. 
4. 11, 12.) Here we have the inspired ideal of 
cooperative action for the common weal. The 
individual members take their places in the larger 
unit according to their several gifts. In the 
development of these gifts the welfare of the indi- 
vidual and the welfare of the congregation sup- 
plement each other in complete harmony. 

Again. If we think of the church as the body 
of Christ, of which body Christ is the head and 
the individuals are members, then it becomes 
clear that the synthesis is complete between our 
individualism and the larger unit. The eye of my 
body does not see only for itself, but as completely 
for the entire body. The better the development 
of the eye, the better will be its service of the 
body. The head cannot say to the foot, I have 



108 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

no need of thee; but the feet will walk better if 
controlled by common sense on the throne of the 
body. The interests of the individual are also 
the interests of the congregation, and the inter- 
ests of the congregation are as much the interests 
of the individual. 

Now suppose the members of the body should 
set to quarreling over who should be the greatest 
in the body, as did the twelve. (Luke 22. 24.) 
Christ's teaching is that it is that member of the 
body that, at the time, renders the greatest serv- 
ice. To-day it may be the hand, to-morrow it may 
be the foot, and next day the eye. With John 
the Baptist, it was his "voice" — a voice that could 
command attention, could thrill assemblies, could 
exhibit courage and good sense and moral con- 
viction, a voice that had the support of his entire 
personality, so that his soul went forth in his 
voice. So the preacher is a herald, an uplifted 
voice with a message. This message is not his 
own, but its trusteeship and heraldry are his. 
Here the development of my individuality as a 
herald will make my heraldry a greater blessing 
to the larger unit. But suppose I break the 
synthesis of the individual and congregational 
unit by taking the place in the congregation 
inspired by a selfish ambition rather than the place 
for which I am fitted by gifts. Then I enter the 
church as a field for the growth of my ambitions. 
I live and work, and get my friends to work to 



INDIVIDUALISM 109 

get me positions of honor, of office, and of power. 
Then the beauty of my ministry and of the Chris- 
tian character is gone like the bloom from a soiled 
flower; then the spiritual life of the church is 
cut at its root; then the goal of personal prefer- 
ment is placed above the goal of a federal con- 
quest. By this alien spirit personal ambitions, 
nurtured by all the arts of political procedure, 
have placed weak men where the church needed 
strong men. The man promoted has the consola- 
tion of his ambitions, but the church has suffered 
leanness of soul. No wonder such men become 
vociferous in exhortations and supply themselves 
with the stock phrases of a foreign enthusiasm. 
They rattle about in places they cannot ade- 
quately fill. They stand upon a pedestal that 
reveals their littleness, although it was created to 
reveal only greatness. An element of insincerity 
envelops them ; their exhortations become hollow ; 
congregations are not fed, and for the thirsty the 
wells of salvation run dry. 

What, then, is to be done in embarrassments of 
this kind? How are the faithful to attain to 
those consolations that proclaim an everlasting 
harmony and make life worth living even here? 
Our only hope is to live up as individuals into 
the raptures of an independent spiritual life — that 
is, into a life that is no longer dependent upon 
our material prosperities, nor upon the applause 
and honors of men, nor upon the popular currents 



no THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

of a social enthusiasm, nor permits itself to be 
deceived by false fires kindled upon the ark of 
the covenant. This independent spiritual life has 
its own laws of growth and development by which 
it can flourish, within or without the larger unit. 
John Bunyan might have gone back into sin 
because the church accorded him no welcome, or 
he might have surrendered to the popular hostil- 
ity that had set in against him, or he might have 
given up the greatest struggle of his life in 
despair when he was thrust as a criminal into 
Bedford Jail, but into that lonely darkness he 
carried with him a good conscience, the Word of 
God, and an experience of that spiritual life 
whose independence asserted itself to the glory 
of God and to the triumph of his individuality. 
While in that jail he felt himself to be released 
from the larger responsibilities of the social unit, 
and turned his attention to the enrichment and 
development of his own life. The result was a 
peaceful conscience and an illuminated under- 
standing, an inspired vision, the consciousness of 
higher and holier realities, and a splendid per- 
sonality, out of whose depths came to the world 
Pilgrim's Progress. After John Milton had 
become poor, blind, abused, and cast aside, he 
retired from the world run by the spirit of a 
sordid selfishness to find his consolations in a 
more intimate association of divine realities that 
carried him from Paradise Lost to Paradise 



INDIVIDUALISM in 

Regained. It is in this independent spiritual life 
that tribulations issue in patience, and patience 
issues in experience, and experience issues in 
hope, and hope issues in courage, because the 
love of God, as the light of an everlasting sun, is 
shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit. 



VIII 
DIVINE PROVIDENCE 



113 



By thy providence. (Acts 24. 2. ) 

Behold the fowls of the air; that 
they sow not, neither do they reap; yet 
your heavenly Father feedeth them. 
Are ye not of much more value than 
they? (Matt. 6. 26, 30.) 

Are not two sparrows sold for a 
farthing? and one of them shall not fall 
to the ground without your Father. 
Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more 
value than many sparrows. (Matt. 10. 
29, 31.) 

Thou wilt guide me with thy coun- 
sel, and afterward receive me to 
glory. (Psa. 73. 24.) 



114 



VIII 

DIVINE PROVIDENCE 

An Attempted Application of R. Eucken's 
Philosophy 

In the consideration of Divine Providence it 
is possible for us to create more confusion than 
we can clear up. If we regard all the passages 
of Scripture as equally authoritative, without 
recognizing the philosophy that underlies the 
utterances of the fathers, we cannot escape con- 
fusion. In the Old Testament we find many 
passages based on the mechanical philosophy of 
the universe. We find in places the deistic idea 
of God, and in places we find man lowered to the 
level of a "worm." If our study of Divine Provi- 
dence be controlled by these three convictions, we 
must think of God as a king afar off who governs 
all this world and shapes man's destiny by 
natural law. But Divine Providence predicates 
a supernatural agency. According to the old in- 
terpretation, by an exceptional and miraculous 
activity, God secures for the righteous their 
crops, their health, their comforts, their successes 
and failures, their sufferings, and their death. 
We are here driven into a blind alley. 

Again. We have been using "Divine Provi- 
115 



n6 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

dence" as a name for God, but it is never so used 
in the Scriptures. Even the word "Providence" 
occurs only once in the Bible, and there it is used 
of Felix, descriptive of his forethought. (Acts 
24. 2.) It is found twice in Solomon's book of 
"Wisdom" as descriptive of the forethought 
provision of God ; first, in making a safe path for 
Israel through the sea, and second, in accounting 
for the defeat of Israel's enemies on the ground 
that they were "exiled from God's eternal Provi- 
dence." (Wisdom 14. 3; 17. 2.) But God's 
forethought provision for man's well-being is 
prominent throughout the Scriptures. This 
divine forethought provision is made manifest on 
two grades. First, there is God's forethought 
provision of this material world, a world pro- 
visioned, adapted, and governed by natural law 
for man's enrichment and benefit. Second, there 
is God's forethought provision of man with 
endowments that elevate him above a thing and 
make him a person, with the "power of an endless 
life." (Heb. 7. 16.) Personality may be defined 
as the concentration of self-consciousness, will, 
imagination, and conscience into one unit of 
energy. Bushnell defines man as "a careering 
force started on its way to eternity; a principle 
of might and of majesty begun to be unfolded, 
and to be progressively unfolded forever. Intelli- 
gence, reason, conscience, observation, choice, 
memory, enthusiasm — all the fires of his inborn 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 117 

eternity are kindled to a glow, and, looking on 
him as a force immortal, just beginning to reveal 
the symptoms of what he shall be, we call him 
man." (Sermons on The New Life, p. 309.) 

I. With. this equipment man was placed in this 
world, not as a thing to be run as God runs the 
planets and the stars, or as he governs animal 
life below man, but as a "power" that is to "sub- 
due" the earth and gain "dominion" over every 
other creature on the earth. (Gen. 1. 28.) This 
power manifests itself in man's adaptation of 
means to ends by which he secures his house, his 
implements of utility, his health, and his material 
prosperity. Here natural laws become man's 
servants, so that in the development of his civil- 
ization man becomes a co-worker with God. In 
this partnership every man should be able, with 
Christ, to say, "My Father worketh hitherto, and 
I work." (John 5. 17.) There is nothing in 
natural law and there is nothing in Divine 
Providence to secure us against recklessness, nor 
against a lack of wisdom, nor against indiscre- 
tions, nor against the requirements of common 
sense. On life's natural level the sluggard gets 
no harvest and the sower reaps what he sows. 

Peter the Great, who built Saint Petersburg, 
"ordered the gulf of Cronstadt to retire" and 
then put his capitol down in a swamp. Then, by 
the most severe and almost barbarous methods, 
he forced workmen from all parts of Russia to 



n8 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

build the city. The conquest of the swamp has 
cost "hundreds of thousands of human lives." 
In 1824, when the Neva rose thirteen feet and 
eight inches, nearly the whole of the city was 
inundated. Three times the city has been thus 
flooded. After each flood, with the purest 
motives, great religious processions paraded the 
streets and then crowded the churches, where 
masses were said by the priests to propitiate the 
mysterious wrath of Almighty God. The climate 
has been always unhealthy. The mortality of the 
city ranges from thirty-four to thirty-eight per 
thousand of the population. In 1883 this rate of 
mortality gave the city 30,150 deaths. (Enc. 
Brit.) Nothing in religion can overcome this 
lack of common sense. 

The Puritans of New England were good, 
religious people, but back in their colonial days 
"they observed fasts to banish mildew, smallpox, 
caterpillars, grasshoppers, and the loss of cattle 
by colds, because they interpreted these plagues 
to be visitations of God's wrath !" They saw an 
inscrutable Providence in all these afflictions. 
When we assume that the spiritual life is 
rewarded by way of natural law, the religious 
man expects better crops than his irreligious 
neighbor simply as a reward of his goodness. 
He is surprised when his irreligious neighbor gets 
better crops as the reward of better methods and 
a greater amount of work. The good man 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 119 

requires the driver of his automobile to be just as 
prudent as the driver hired by the bad man. 
Nothing in Divine Providence can atone for care- 
lessness here. 

My conviction is that we get rid of much con- 
fusion when we remember that, on the natural 
level, God blesses all of us with equality of oppor- 
tunity. This blessing may be denied us by men 
and by combinations of men, but through his 
prophet God protests against being charged with 
anything less than an impartial attitude toward 
all men on the natural level. "O house of Israel, 
are not my ways equal?" (Ezek. 18. 29.) "He 
maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, 
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." 
(Matt. 5. 45.) 

II. When we advance from the natural level up 
into the spiritual level, the outlook greatly 
changes. Here there is a difference in values 
and a transfer of emphasis. Here God's fore- 
thought provision shows that, as to our possi- 
bilities, he sees much more in us than we see in 
ourselves. First. He sees enough in us to 
justify all the interest he takes on our behalf; to 
justify the suffering of prophets, apostles, and 
reformers, and the humiliating sacrifice and 
passion of his Son. Second. At the point where 
our mental vision fails us, where we become a 
mystery to ourselves, where we can see into a 
mirror but darkly and can know only in part, 



i2o THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

God's forethought provision is manifest in plac- 
ing our salvation within the grasp of faith. Here 
faith becomes a type of divine energy that trans- 
lates us from the dominion of darkness into God's 
kingdom of light. 

Upon this spiritual level the emphasis is upon 
the man rather than upon his possessions. Here 
the promise is life and "the light of life." Here 
Jacob's name is changed to Israel, that the 
emphasis of his life may be transferred from the 
goal of commercial success to the enrichment of 
his personality. Here Simon's name is changed 
to Peter, that the apostle may be saved from the 
vacillations of action on the lower level and 
secured as a rock on the higher level. The mis- 
take we make is in the assumption that the pros- 
perities of life on the lower level are the rewards 
of life on the higher level. This mistake leads us 
to follow Christ for what is in his basket more 
than for the redemptive energy of his life. It 
puts religion on a commercial basis where good- 
ness is valued in terms of a material prosperity. 
At this point Christ rebukes us for our misplaced 
emphasis. (John 6. 26.) The only man Christ 
called a "fool" was a rich man, not because he 
had riches, but because riches had him. Riches 
had made him the slave of the spirit of commer- 
cialism until material values overshadowed all 
others. He represents the combination of a fat 
body with a lean soul. (Psa. 106. 15.) All the 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 121 

sacred and more divine values of personality are 
in a low condition of vitality because the emphasis 
of life has all gone to feed the lower nature. 

Again. The man who got on most conspicu- 
ously in Judaea, the man whose ambitions had 
been gratified by place and power and money, 
Christ did not hesitate to call a "fox." Herod's 
low cunning, his utter lack of the principles of 
justice and honor, and the emphasis of his life 
given to the gratification of his low animal 
impulses had developed in him the characteristics 
of the brute instead of the likeness of the sons of 
God. On the other hand, the man who every- 
body thought was a failure, the man of the wilder- 
ness, without a house or home, without a society 
dress, and without the necessities of a comfort- 
able existence, was the man whom Christ called 
the greatest ever born of woman, and when he 
uttered these words, John was in prison, waiting 
to be executed. 

Again. We are apt to confound men with their 
callings. This Christ never did. Concerning 
Jesus, the Pharisees ask, "Is not this the car- 
penter's son?" (Matt. 13. 55.) The conviction 
was that his life was providentially circumscribed 
by the narrow range of the shop. Now Christ 
was a carpenter, as Paul was a tentmaker, only 
on the material level of life. On this level their 
conditions of success were the same that blessed 
other workmen. But above this shop-level these 



122 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

men found richer values than the crowns of 
kings. Poverty did not bother these two men 
much, because the emphasis of life was upon their 
efficiency as heralds of the truth. This required 
manhood, fidelity, self-sacrifice, clear vision, com- 
bined with heroic faith, a wise concentration of 
energy and steady devotion to divinely revealed 
ideals. No sacrifices of values on the lower level 
were too great for the attainment of the higher 
values on the spiritual level. Paul exclaims, "O 
the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and 
knowledge of God." (Rom. n. 33.) "The 
riches of his goodness," "of his grace," "of his 
glory." (Rom. 2. 4; 9. 23; Eph. 1. 7.) These 
higher values are God's forethought provisions 
that bless the spiritual life with its richer content. 
Here God's provisions are qualification, illumina- 
tion, and inspiration. 

Bezaleel was called of God to be the carpenter 
of the tabernacle. God's forethought provision 
for this man was wisdom, understanding, knowl- 
edge and skill of workmanship. (Exod. 31. 3-5.) 
Whenever a man ascends from the material to 
the spiritual level of life, or gets beyond the 
bounds of his own selfishness into the expansive 
life of philanthropy, or aims to develop his per- 
sonality as an end in itself, or as a plan of life 
to be unfolded in wisdom, in love, and in power, 
God meets that man with an equipment for suc- 
cess. This equipment Christ defines by the 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 123 

word "talents" (Matt. 25. 25) and Paul by the 
term "gifts." (1 Cor. 12. 1-11.) God calls this 
man into his counsel as he did Abraham and 
Moses, and the prophets and the apostles. To 
Abraham, he says: "Fear not, Abram, I am thy 
shield and thy exceeding great reward." (Gen. 
15. 1.) "I will bless thee and thou shalt be a 
blessing." (Gen. 12. 2.) To Moses, God says: 
"Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, 
and teach thee what thou shalt say." (Exod. 4. 
12.) With reference to the construction of the 
vessels for the tabernacle, God says: "See that 
thou make them after the patterns which were 
shown thee in the mount." (Exod. 25. 40.) For 
Isaiah, God appeared in a vision of glory, touched 
his lips, purged him of his iniquity, equipped him, 
and then assigned to him his work. (Isa. 6. 1-8.) 
Every true prophet is met on the threshold of his 
expansive life and is divinely equipped for suc- 
cess in his appointed task. 

Of Paul, the Lord said : "He is a chosen vessel 
unto me to bear my name before the Gentiles and 
kings and the children of Israel." "I will show 
him how great things he must suffer for my 
name's sake." (Acts 9. 15, 16.) Paul seems to 
have prayed to be permitted to begin his Chris- 
tian heraldry in Jerusalem, but he says: "I saw 
him [Christ] saying unto me, Make haste and 
get quickly out of Jerusalem, for they will not 
receive thy testimony concerning me." "Depart, 



i2 4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

for I will send thee far off unto the Gentiles." 
(Acts 22. 17, 18, 21.) Another divine fore- 
thought provision for Paul was the preparation 
of the church at Antioch as a background of 
support for the apostle. Then in the prosecution 
of his work Paul received repeated assurances 
that his course was being directed by the same 
Divinity that sent him forth. (Acts 16. 6-10.) 
Upon this higher level Divine Providence is mani- 
fested by the Spirit's witness with our spirits 
(Rom. 8. 16), by helping us in weakness (Rom. 
8. 26), by teaching us wisdom (1 Cor. 2. 13), by 
urging us on, by strengthening us, and by keep- 
ing in subjection the sensuous impulses of nature. 
(Rom. 8. I3f.) The Spirit becomes the law of 
our conduct (Rom. 8. 2-4), grants us an expe- 
rience of the love of God (Rom. 5. 5), and en- 
riches our life with the spirit of adoption, whereby 
we cry Abba, Father. (Rom. 8. 15; Gal. 4. 6.) 

III. Does this divinely directed course involve 
suffering? We answer, Yes, on the lower level, 
but not on the higher. It is a common teaching, 
even of heathen philosophy, that no man is really 
happy until he is superior to fortune; until his 
happiness springs out of the richness of his own 
personality rather than out of his material cir- 
cumstances. In this field of activity our chief 
personal concern is to "play the man," to accept 
hardships as forms of discipline, to regard oppo- 
sitions as the world's challenge that requires us 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 125 

to get out of dullness into alertness, out of cow- 
ardice into courage, out of littleness into great- 
ness, out of the control of the natural life into the 
power of the spiritual. Upon the spiritual level 
our sufferings on the natural level become a 
negligible quantity in the equation. The higher 
values are incomparably richer than the lower 
values. Here, in the fellowship of Christ's suffer- 
ings, the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon us. 
(1 Pet. 4. 14.) Here we enter upon the high- 
way of the redeemed, where we mount up as with 
wings of eagles ; where we run and are not weary ; 
or walk and do not faint. (Isa. 40. 31.) Our 
guidance by God's counsel here issues in glory. 
(Psa. 73. 24.) 



IX 
DIVINE PROVIDENCE— {Continued) 



127 



God is light. (1 John 1. 5.) 

In thy light shall we see light. (Psa. 
36. 9.) 

Unto the upright there ariseth light 
in darkness. (Psa. 112. 4.) 

The Lord shall be unto thee an ever- 
lasting light. (Isa. 60. 19.) 

God, who commanded light to shine 
out of darkness, hath shined in our 
hearts, to give us the light of the knowl- 
edge of the glory of God in the face 
of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4. 6.) 

In him was life; and the light was 
the light of men. (John 1. 4.) 



iaS 



IX 

DIVINE PROVIDENCE (Continued) 

Lights and Shadows 

I. The history of the human race is an account 
of man's struggle from darkness to light. Sup- 
pose you blot out all electric light, and also blot 
out of man's mind his knowledge of how to 
restore it ; then put out gas light and man's knowl- 
edge of how to produce it; then extinguish oil 
light and man's knowledge of the existence of oil ; 
then put out candle light and man's knowledge 
of how to make candles; then destroy friction 
matches and our knowledge of how to make 
them; we should then have an adequate appre- 
ciation of the embarrassments of darkness. 
Likewise, suppose you blot out New Testament 
revelation and crowd us back into the mental and 
moral darkness of Abraham and there begin over 
again to advance to the illumination of the pres- 
ent hour; we should have a keener appreciation 
of the difficulties to be overcome. We may 
see what would happen by reading what has 
happened. Back in that past we find star-worship 
mingled with sun-worship. We think of the 
pagan religions as stars in the night. They did 

something to relieve the darkness, but could not 

129 



i 3 o THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

produce daylight. The daybeams of revealing 
splendor that emanate from our Scriptures are 
quite superior to the light of those stars. The 
Old Testament records how these revelations 
began, were continued, became clearer and fuller 
and more triumphant over darkness. 

This conquest of light over darkness is also 
made manifest in civilizations. At first these are 
polytheistic; then there follows the monotheistic 
reformation of Abraham; then brighter days 
dawn under the institutions of Moses ; then come 
the more spiritual, living realities of the prophets, 
with their visions of a coming Messiah. In this 
Messianic dawn Isaiah says : "We wait for light, 
. . . but we walk in darkness." (Isa. 59. 9.) 
Later, in the rapture of his vision, he exclaims, 
"Arise, shine, for thy light cometh, and the glory 
of the Lord is risen upon thee." (Isa. 60. 1.) 
With this same prophetic enthusiasm, Luke 
writes : "The dayspring from on high hath visited 
us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and 
in the shadow of death ; to guide our feet into the 
way of peace." (Luke 1. 78, 79.) 

This, the brightest of all such lights, now 
blesses the world. It has done, and is doing, 
more than all other such lights to banish the dark- 
ness of ignorance, the despair of superstition, and 
the shadows of the valley of death. More than 
any other such light it reveals the sacredness of 
childhood, cradles the affections, illuminates the 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 131 

home, stimulates virtue, and glorifies parenthood. 
More than any other light it reveals human rights 
in the name of justice and develops the spirit 
of universal brotherhood. More than any other 
light it has rebuked the tyrant, blessed the slave, 
cast down the proud, exalted the humble, 
strengthened the weak, and saved the lost. More 
than any other light it has inflicted merited pun- 
ishment upon vice and accorded to virtue her 
merited reward. As compared with the Old 
Testament, the New occupies a higher level, im- 
parts a brighter illumination, reveals a clearer 
sky, and blesses humanity with more extended 
visions. Its choir of angels, its mountain of 
transfiguration, its resurrection and ascension, 
its Pentecost and regenerating efficiency, its 
revelations of Christ's continued ministry in the 
church militant, and Christ's exaltation in the 
church triumphant, all combine to reveal to us 
the summits of aspirational achievements, where 
our feet are upon the mountain and our conversa- 
tion is in heaven. 

Nevertheless, as the brightest sun casts the 
most clearly cut shadows, so in this clearest 
revelation we find clearly outlined shadows, and 
these are in men who have been most clearly 
illuminated. John the Baptist is the last and the 
greatest of the prophets. (Matt. 11. 11, 13.) 
He appears as a strong, stalwart, high-minded 
man; a man of a pure heart, clean hands, and a 



132 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

bright mind. He is an heroic spirit with a clear 
conscience, a high calling, a lofty aim, an aggres- 
sive energy, and a prophetic vision of coming 
glory. In the illumination of mind and heart 
and life, he is far above his fellows ; far above the 
men who became apostles. He sees what they do 
not see. The twelve apostles require time, asso- 
ciation, and teaching to see in Jesus the fulfill- 
ment of Old Testament prophecy, but John the 
Baptist, at the first interview, beholds in Jesus the 
Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the 
world. His intuitional nature is so awake that 
the meaning of the Carpenter's presence enters 
his field of consciousness as a glorious dawn. To 
him the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God appears in the face of Jesus, and John names 
him Messiah, or Christ. Following this, his 
uttered convictions shame indifference, awaken 
interest, convince the judgment, convict the con- 
science, and call forth repentance as a prepara- 
tion for the coming Messiah. Prophecy becomes 
triumphant in him. 

Now it may seem strange that with this 
brilliant illumination there is associated one of 
the darkest shadows that can fall to the lot of 
mortals. Here the shadow is cast in dungeon 
darkness. It is a shadow that not only darkens 
his abode, but casts a curtain upon his prophetic 
vision; a shadow so dense and so dark that he 
begins to ask himself if he had really seen the 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 133 

sun rise at all. John recalls his clear visions of 
yesterday and their attendant enthusiasms, but 
to-day he is discouraged, and his discouragement 
breeds doubt, and doubt opens the path to 
despair. Rather than surrender to this dark- 
ness, John asks his own disciples to go to Jesus 
and there learn if his visions of yesterday were 
delusions or the revelations of truth. 

Again. We think of the apostle Peter as the 
"Rock," as a "pillar" in the church, as a man 
who triumphed in the faith and has been glorified 
by his achievements. In these high walks of his 
life, he is the first of the twelve to see, by revela- 
tion, that Jesus is the Son of God; the first to 
publish the fact and import of Christ's resurrec- 
tion, and the first to recognize Paul at his full 
value. At Pentecost he occupies the summit of 
revelation; sees in the risen Christ the "Prince 
of Life" and the Saviour of men, and these things 
he boldly declares. But at the foot of this sunlit 
summit lies the shadow. Away down there in 
the valley is Peter, shadowed by denial, by false- 
hood, by desertion, and by the tears of a reprov- 
ing conscience. In that shadow he is weak, and 
not strong; foolish, and not wise; negative, and 
not positive. He there lacks courage, fidelity, and 
loyalty. Finally he finds himself without friends, 
without peace of conscience, and devoid of self- 
respect. 

Again. Paul is a man of clear mental vision, 



i 3 4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

of conscience, of definite purpose, of determina- 
tion, and of courage. While obeying his con- 
science he is confronted with a marvelous light 
that pales the glory of a Syrian noonday. You 
cannot convince Paul that he has not seen Jesus 
on that Damascus road, both in the objective and 
in the subjective sense. This revelation is the 
stay and support of his life, the joy of his heart ? 
the author of his faith, the inspiration of his min- 
istry, the source of his power, and the authority 
of his apostleship. Nevertheless, Paul immedi- 
ately enters the shadow of a three days' blind- 
ness. In that shadow Paul the proud becomes 
Paul the humble; Paul the strong becomes Paul 
the weak; Paul the master becomes Paul the 
slave; Paul the exalted becomes Paul the cast- 
down; Paul the far-seeing becomes Paul the 
blind; Paul the leader becomes Paul the led. 
Yesterday, Paul was in a trance in the temple 
while he prayed, but to-day he is treated as the 
filth and off-scouring of the world — he is stoned 
at Lystra, imprisoned and scourged at Philippi, 
and made to fight with wild beasts at Ephesus. 
When we see him a little later, he tells us that 
yesterday he was translated to the third heaven, 
above the shadow of all human infirmities, but 
to-day he is praying that he may not become a 
castaway. 

Now these are not exceptional experiences, but 
they are the rule. Thomas, James, and John, the 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 135 

apostle, passed their lives through the same fluc- 
tuations of light and shadow. Even Christ has 
his mountain of transfiguration followed by his 
Gethsemane. Here his life is shadowed by deser- 
tion and intense suffering. He treads the wine- 
press alone, and of the people, none are with him. 

II. We can all sympathize with Peter in his 
desire to live permanently in the light of Christ's 
transfiguration. Life is here rewarded with 
expansion and vision. We here gain the con- 
sciousness of our divine relationship, and aspira- 
tion is set free. Then whence do these shadows 
come and wherefore? In this mood David asks, 
"Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath he 
in anger shut up his tender mercies? Is his 
mercy clean gone forever ? And will he be favor- 
able no more?" (Psa. yy. 8-10.) David is again 
anchored by attributing his "alarm" to his own 
infirmities. (Psa. 31. 22; 77. 10.) I have been 
measuring my faith by my sight. I have failed 
to recognize my limitations of vision or to dis- 
cover that the darkness is in me, as in one who 
sees into a mirror darkly. My faith assures me 
that the sun shines, although I cannot see it. In 
that faith I shall wrap the mantle of peace about 
me until the sun rises again. 

Our shadows distress us apparently because 
they cause us to fear that our lights have deceived 
us. The two experiences seem to be direct con- 
tradictions of each other. A careful review will 



i 3 6 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

show that it is when we are weak and dull and 
overwhelmed, either by the infirmities of our 
nature or by the antagonisms of our environ- 
ment, that these shadows come. It is when we 
are strong and bright and uninterrupted in 
mental concentration and in aspirational effort 
that light arises out of darkness and the day star 
appears within the field of our own consciousness. 
(2 Pet. 1. 19.) Since this brightness rewards 
us when our forces of personality are at their 
best, we ought to abide by those facts that are 
obtained at the summits of our life rather than 
surrender to those shadows that accompany the 
inferior states of consciousness. 

Again. Bergson has shown that we never 
gain these sunlit summits by our rational faculty ; 
that is, we can never reason ourselves into them, 
but they become ours only through our intuitional 
nature. They are the rewards of an exhilaration 
of our spiritual life; are moments of supreme 
spiritual vitality that rewards consciousness with 
the realities of the spiritual world. Here we see 
light in God's light because we have the unction 
of the Holy One. (1 John 2. 20.) Here the 
branch receives the vital current of the vine, and 
by an experience of vitality knows that spring 
is here, with its light and warmth and glory, and 
that the winter has passed, with its clouds and 
frost. The divinity of our nature becomes active 
and gives its own expression to consciousness. 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 137 

Then we come down from the mountain of 
transfiguration to the lower natural level of life, 
where everything is being run by the rational 
faculty or by the impulse of animalism, and we 
find ourselves in an alien environment. When we 
attempt to maintain our spiritual level by the 
rational process, our failure is inevitable. We 
may thus become creedal Christians, men of 
sound doctrine as to the rational level ; sound as 
a bell and as immovable as a rock, but life moves, 
life grows, life expands, and religion is life. The 
moment you confine it by your syllogism or iron- 
bound creed, it dies. Thus the old creeds became 
its coffin, but because religion is life, it always 
came to a resurrection by a vitality of its own. 
These empty coffins that lie strewn over the path 
of human history are mute witnesses to the power 
of that spiritual life that endures as seeing him 
who is invisible. (Heb. 1 1. 2j.) Our Great 
Teacher reminds us that "in the world," or on 
the world-level, we shall have tribulation, but 
exhorts us to be of good cheer, because it is pos- 
sible for us, like him, to overcome the world. 
(John 16. 33.) 

Then, a shadowed life need not mean a deserted 
life, nor a deceived life, nor a defeated life, but 
it does mean a disciplined life. It does mean that 
our worries, conflicts, and tribulations on the 
natural level may be transcended by our more 
abundant life on the spiritual level. It does mean 



i 3 8 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

that we may so conduct ourselves that the afflic- 
tions of the lower level shall drive us ever more 
and more to the exhilarating experiences of the 
higher level. It does mean that if we endure 
sufferings, as Christians, on the lower level, God 
will glorify us on the upper level. 

III. That Christ's suffering was not all vica- 
rious is evident in the declaration that it was 
"fitting" for God "to make the captain of our 
salvation perfect through sufferings." (Heb. 2. 
10.) Here suffering appears as God's fore- 
thought provision for the development of the 
heroic elements of the Christian character that 
become to the individual a crown of glory. In 
this sense our present world becomes God's train- 
ing ground, where he prepares us for the more 
abundant life of the world to come. In harmony 
with this purpose, Peter exhorts us to avoid 
suffering as a thief, or as an evil-doer, or as a 
murderer, but to rejoice at being partakers of 
Christ's sufferings, because then "the Spirit of 
glory and of power and of God rests upon us." 
This same vision justifies Paul in desiring the 
fellowship of Christ's sufferings. (Phil. 3. 10.) 
When Paul had computed the equation of life's 
values on the two levels, he said: "Let us rejoice 
in tribulations, for tribulation worketh patience, 
and patience, experience, and experience, hope, 
and hope is not put to shame because the love 
(agapa, not amor) of God has been shed abroad 



DIVINE PROVIDENCE 139 

in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given unto us." 
(Rom. 5. 3-5, Emphatic Diaglott Edition.) 
Then the afflictions on the lower level work out 
for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight 
of glory on the upper level. Paul therefore 
determines that neither tribulation, nor distress, 
nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor 
peril, nor sword, nor anything else, can justify 
our separation from the love of God as revealed 
in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 8. 35.) 

Again. On the lower level Paul becomes 
keenly conscious of his personal infirmities. The 
marks of one hundred and ninety-five stripes are 
upon his body, in addition to the marks left by 
being thrice beaten with rods and the wounds 
received by stoning. Then he enumerates the 
hardships he had endured in the prosecution of 
his work, and uncovers his heart to us by asking, 
"Who is weak, and I am not weak?" (2 Cor. 11. 
29. ) To him his infirmities and weaknesses seem 
to have invited all of his sufferings. At first he 
avoided them, shrank from them, prayed to be 
spared them, but when he received divine assur- 
ance that God's grace would be sufficient for him, 
and that by this means the power of God would 
find its expression in him, he wrote, "I rather 
glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ 
may rest upon me." (2 Cor. 12. 9.) 

To maintain this immediate relation with 
Deity, Christ says that "men ought always to 



i 4 o THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

pray and not faint." (Luke 18. I.) It is not the 
language nor the argument of prayer that gives 
it efficiency, but it is man's aspirational nature 
steadily held to the source of its power. Here 
the energies of the inward man are focalized upon 
their native element until reinforcement is the 
reward. Man here lives out of darkness into 
light, out of weakness into power, out of his 
inferior states of consciousness into the raptures 
of a higher life. To secure this elevation of life, 
nothing can take the place of prayer. It becomes 
man's walk into the Holy of holies, where the 
voice of the Shekinah is the voice of God. 



X 
IMMORTALITY 



141 



Jesus said unto her, I am the resur- 
rection, and the life; he that belie veth 
in me, though he were dead, yet shall 
he live; and whosoever liveth and be- 
lieveth in me shall never die. (John 
11. 25, 26.) 

Our Saviour Jesus Christ abolished 
death and brought life and immortality 
to light through the gospel. (2 Tim. 
1. 10.) 

Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep. 
. . . Jesus spake of his death: but they 
thought that he had spoken of taking 
of rest in sleep. (John 11. 11-13.) 

If we believe that Jesus died and rose 
again, even so them also that are fallen 
asleep in Jesus will God bring with 
him. (IThess. 4. 14.) 



143 



X 

IMMORTALITY 

The conviction of man's immortality did not 
have its birth in the New Testament. We find it 
far back in human history, both pagan and Jew- 
ish. With striking unanimity the early races of 
men thought of death not as a destruction of per- 
sonality, but as a transition from one state of 
being to another. The thinkers of India, Egypt, 
Greece, and Phoenicia, in harmony with the Jew, 
believed that their dead departed to a dark under- 
world beneath the earth by way of the grave, or 
in the remote regions of the setting sun. Like 
the sun, life sank into darkness, and by the same 
gate entered the underworld. By none of these 
ancient people was death thought of as being the 
complete end of existence. The views of the 
Jew and the Greek were so much alike that in the 
New Testament the Greek word "Hades" takes 
the place of the Hebrew word "Sheol," and the 
Greek conceptions of the character of the under- 
world prevail in the New Testament. Hades 
means "darkness," and Sheol, "stillness," both 
descriptive of the cavern darkness and silence 
of the underworld. Here the departed spent a 
dreary, dark, and cheerless existence, without the 

143 



i 4 4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

distinction of good or evil, of age or rank. They 
existed as shadows, walking in darkness, as per- 
sons. Later, among both Jews and Greeks there 
gradually developed the conviction that the de- 
parted retained the consciousness of happiness 
and of misery, and that existence in that under- 
world was made comparatively "blessed" for the 
good and wretched for the bad. With the 
Greeks we find "Elysium" as the abiding place 
for the good and "Tartarus" for the bad. In the 
New Testament, Paradise takes the place of 
Elysium as the place of abode for the good and 
Tartarus is retained as the place of residence for 
the bad. 

I. The Old Testament conception of immortal- 
ity offers us an exceedingly interesting study. My 
purpose here is to trace only the striking features 
of its character and growth. First, because man 
has in his nature the capacity of acquiring 
immortality, he is driven beyond the garden in 
which grows "the tree of life." (Gen. 3. 22.) 
After this, his way to eternal life lies in the possi- 
bility of his redemption by way of righteousness. 
The translations of Enoch and Elijah are demon- 
strations of this redemption. We are apt to make 
too little of these translations. To the Jews they 
had all the force of well-attested facts. To get 
at their influence, we should study them as facts. 
Thus viewed, we see that the death of Abel had 
declared man to be mortal, but the translation of 



IMMORTALITY 145 

Enoch declares man to be immortal. In Enoch's 
time immortality meant eternally living, in which 
the life of the body was involved. The question 
had been, since man is mortal, is there any method 
by which man can attain to immortality? Here 
is God's picture as an answer. It is not a resur- 
rection, not an awakening from sleep, but eter- 
nally living. An excessive emphasis upon the life 
and immortality brought to light by the gospel 
has obscured this Old Testament teaching. Yes, 
Christ did bring life and immortality to light by 
the gospel, but Elohim brought man's immor- 
tality to light by translation. The difference is 
that while Enoch escapes death, Christ conquers 
death. The agreement is that whether we go out 
of this world by translation or by way of the 
grave, we are to live forever. The possibility of 
immortality by "walking with God," or by way of 
righteousness, becomes "the keynote, the prelude 
to all the coming music." "He walked with God, 
and God took him, are words that never cease to 
echo through every corridor of Bible history." 
"They ring through the desert; they resound 
through the tabernacle; they peal through the 
temple ; they sing through the Exile ; they breathe 
through the songs of the Restoration; they 
vibrate through the sermon on the Mount." (G. 
Matheson, Representative Men of the Bible, p. 
79.) This attainment of immortality by right- 
eousness seems to have inspired the proverb, "In 



i 4 6 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

the pathway of the righteous there is no death." 
(Prov. 12. 28.) 

Because these traditional facts were taken by 
the Jews at their face value, it seems only fair to 
recognize their influence in our interpretation of 
the sixteenth psalm. "My flesh also shall dwell in 
safety, for thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol ; 
neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see 
corruption, or 'the Pit,' that is, to die. Thou 
wilt show me the path of life." (Psa. 16. 9-1 1, 
R. V. ) It also seems to be this redeemed type of 
immortality by way of righteousness that inspires 
Job to say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and 
that he shall stand up at last upon the earth ; and 
after my skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from 
[or without] my flesh shall I see God." Job is 
looking for the immortality of Enoch by way of 
righteousness. He therefore adds: "My right- 
eousness I hold fast, and will not let it go." (Job 
2J. 6.) This immortality by way of righteous- 
ness promised a more abundant life with God, 
but man's existence in the dark underworld 
meant that he was cut off from God, with a low 
type of vitality that despaired of a resurrection. 
Job seems to express the general conviction when 
he says, "As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth 
away ; so he that goeth down to Sheol shall come 
up no more." "So man lieth down and riseth 
not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not 
awake." (Job 7. 9; 14. 12.) 



IMMORTALITY 147 

II. Solomon appears as a new star in this dark- 
ness. According to him man's death is nature's 
method by which "the dust returns to the earth as 
it was : and the spirit returns unto God who gave 
it." (Eccl. 12. 7.) This incorporeal immortality 
Solomon again asserts in his Book of Wisdom. 
"God created man to be immortal, and made him 
to be an image of his own eternity." "The souls 
of the righteous are in the hands of God, and 
there shall no torment touch them." "In the 
sight of the unwise they seem to die, and their 
departure is taken for misery, but they are in 
peace; their hope is full of immortality." "The 
righteous live for evermore ; their reward also is 
with the Lord, and the care of them is with the 
Most High." "To know thee is perfect right- 
eousness; yea, to know thy power is the root of 
immortality. " (Wisdom 2. 23; 3. 1-4; 5. 15; 
z 5- 3-) We find a reflection of Solomon's teach- 
ing in the forty-ninth psalm. As this psalm seems 
to have been written during the Jewish captivity, 
there had been ample time for Solomon's teach- 
ing concerning an incorporeal immortality to be 
well known. In harmony with Solomon, the 
author describes death as a shepherd to conduct 
the wicked down into the abode of Sheol, and 
then adds: "But God will redeem my soul from 
the power of Sheol, for he shall receive me." 
(Psa. 49. 15.) 

III. When Israel, as a nation, lay prostrate in 



148 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

the dust, certain prophets predicted Israel's rise 
to national power as a resurrection of national 
life. This vision stands forth in prophecy as a 
golden age when "the Lord God will wipe away 
the tears from off all faces." (Isa. 25. 8.) In 
these prophecies of a national resurrection the 
personality of the individual lies in the back- 
ground. The collective personality of the nation 
is to rise again and flourish everlastingly in 
virtue of revitalization in righteousness. (Isa. 
25. 26, 27 '; Ezek. 37. 1-14; Hosea 6. I, 2; 13. 14.) 

IV. With this preparation we come into the 
New Testament, which is like emerging from 
twilight into daylight. Here the individual, and 
not the nation, comes into prominence. 

First. Christ is confronted by the Sadducees, 
"who deny that there is any resurrection'' (Luke 
20. 27), on the ground of the alleged silence of 
the Scriptures and on the incredibility of the con- 
tinued existence of the body. In answer to these 
men, Christ asserts that they who attain to the 
resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are 
given in marriage, for neither can they die any 
more, and are the sons of God, being sons of the 
resurrection; but that the dead are raised, even 
Moses showed when he called the Lord the God 
of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God 
of Jacob. (Luke 20. 34-37.) It seems clear that 
our Lord's position is that while things may have 
a creator and owner, it is only a living person 



IMMORTALITY 149 

who can have a God. If Abraham, or any man, 
had lost his personality when he died, and had 
thus become a thing, he could no longer have a 
God. When God, therefore, says, "I am the God 
of Abraham," the implication is that Abraham 
retains his personality, although out of the body. 
(See Int. Natl. Com.) In his parable of the rich 
man and Lazarus, Christ teaches that the dead 
carry the attributes of personality into both the 
abode of the lost and the abode of the saved. The 
rich man is in Hades and is in torment, but the 
poor beggar is in peace, with Abraham. (Luke 
16. 19-31.) 

Second. That man not only carries his per- 
sonality beyond this life, but that his relationship 
with God is not broken, nor interrupted by death, 
Christ shows in his resurrection of Lazarus. 
Although out of the body, Lazarus retains his 
conscious relation with Christ, retains his power 
of obedience, or will, retains his memory, and, 
as a person, responds to Christ's call. Christ 
demonstrates his empire over both worlds. The 
whole family, in heaven and in earth, is under one 
and the same dominion. (Eph. 3. 15.) A similar 
demonstration of this extended empire Christ 
gives in his resurrection of the daughter of Jairus 
and in the resurrection of the widow's son at the 
gate of Nain. (Mark 5. 22-42; Luke 7. 14, 15.) 

Third. The prevalent conviction is that death 
means the destruction of consciousness as well as 



ISO THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

the dissolution of the body. Thus the disciples 
of our Lord spoke of death. Jesus corrects this 
error by saying, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; 
but I go that I may awake him out of sleep. 
They thought that he had spoken of taking of 
rest in sleep, but Jesus was speaking of his 
death." (John n. n-13.) With this same con- 
ception of death, Luke says of Stephen, "He 
fell asleep." (Acts 7. 60.) By this teaching the 
word graveyard (the yard of graves) has been 
changed to cemetery, "the sleeping place." This 
is the exact equivalent in Greek of the word 
"dormitory" in Latin. When we recall that the 
word catacomb has the same derivation as our 
word cemetery, with a prefix that makes it mean 
"an underground sleeping place," we discover a 
whole history of the thought and feeling created 
by this teaching of Christ. 

Again. We naturally shrink from the dread- 
ful reality of death. To an untrained mind this 
reality is abhorrent. It seems to suggest the pres- 
ence of some evil messenger who forces us out of 
this world against our wish and power. Christ 
tries to fortify his disciples against this experi- 
ence by telling them what will happen and the 
order of the events. (Matt. 20. 17-19.) At the 
last supper he announces that he can tarry with 
them only for a little time, and that whither he 
went, they could not follow him now. (John 
I 3- 33-) "But I will not leave you comfortless, 



IMMORTALITY 151 

I will come to you. Because I live, ye shall live 
also." (John 14. 18, 19.) In harmony with 
Christ's manner of going out of this world we 
get the word "decease," which means "to with- 
draw" or to retire to sleep. Our friends have 
not been driven, but have simply withdrawn from 
our company ; have withdrawn from the material 
life to the spiritual, from a life measured by time 
to a life measured by eternity. "Ye now have 
sorrow, but" good night, "I will see you again, 
and your heart will rejoice." (John 16. 22.) 

The Resurrection 

"Remember how he spake unto you when he 
was yet in Galilee, saying, The Son of man must 
be crucified and the third day rise again." (Luke 
24. 6, 7.) Christ shows that he can make a 
promise prior to his death and carry it into effect 
after his resurrection. It becomes evident that 
death did not destroy his memory, nor his will, 
nor his power to keep his promise to his disciples, 
even though they remain on this side the grave. 
All the attributes of personality manifest them- 
selves in the risen Christ as completely as they did 
during his incarnation. Even his interest in his 
disciples, his affection for them, his recognition 
of them, and his authority over them, remain in 
evidence as types of an immortal energy. 

I. The Asiatic teaching that finally gained the 
faith of the Greeks was that, after the dead were 



i 5 2 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

led to drink of the water of the river of Oblivion, 
they might return to animate other bodies on 
earth. (Anthon's CI. Die. Pluto.) The Egyptian 
hope of immortality was confined to a revivifica- 
tion of the flesh, and this hope induced them to 
embalm the body so as to preserve it from destruc- 
tion. New Testament teaching carries us in a 
very different direction. We do not say that man 
is a body and has a spirit, but we say man is a 
spirit and has a body. The body is a thing, but 
the spirit constitutes personality. According to 
natural law, the earthly house of this tabernacle 
(bodily frame) must be dissolved, because "flesh 
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" 
(i Cor. 15. 50), but we have a building of God, 
"a spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15. 44), with "the 
power of an endless life." (Heb. 7. 16.) "If 
there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual 
body." (1 Cor. 15. 44, R. V.) The resurrection 
proclaims an emancipation from the limitations 
and frailties of the material life. Those who live 
above the natural or material level into life's 
spiritual level "attain unto the power of Christ's 
resurrection." (Phil. 3. 10, 11; Luke 20. 35, 
R. V.) For these the risen Christ becomes "the 
first-fruit of them that are asleep." (1 Cor. 15. 
20.) The first-fruit always represents the com- 
ing harvest. It follows that as Christ carried 
over from the material body into the spiritual 
body all the attributes of personality, so shall we. 



IMMORTALITY 153 

Did Christ retain his rational faculties ? So shall 
we. Did he retain his memory? So shall we. 
Did he retain his interest and affection for his 
"friends" and "brethren ?" So shall we. Did his 
faculty of recognition desert him in the presence 
of Peter and Thomas? Then it will not desert 
us. We must conclude that there is no tomb 
for those human faculties that transcend the five 
senses. 

This transition from the natural to the more 
abundant spiritual life means not a loss, but a 
gain ; not a sorrow, but a joy ; not a depletion of 
existence, but a vast expanse of being ; not Sheol 
darkness, but heaven lit up by "the glory of God." 

II. The risen Christ maintains a unique rela- 
tion to humanity. We should not think of him 
as a "celestial man," or simply as "the firstborn 
from the dead" (Col. 1. 18), but he has become 
our "one Lord" (2 Cor. 8. 6) "to whom every 
knee should bow, and every tongue confess that 
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
Father." (Phil. 2. 10, 11.) "Now the Lord is 
the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3. 17), "a life-giving Spirit." 
(1 Cor. 15. 45.) As such, by his resurrection, 
he transcended the limitations of the flesh and 
now enlightens every man who comes into the 
world. (John 1.9.) With this import Paul can 
say, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me." 
(Gal. 1. 16.) "Christ becomes to Christian con- 
sciousness that which Jehovah was to the pro- 



i 5 4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

phetic consciousness." (Sabatier's The Apostle 
Paul, p. 113.) He becomes also the head of the 
church and the guiding spirit of every member. 
Christ thus reincarnates himself in humanity and 
perpetuates his divine redemptive energy. We 
now get what Christ means by saying, ' 'Because I 
live ye shall live also." (John 14. 19.) Christ 
within us as a living energy, made manifest in 
righteousness, becomes our hope of glory. We 
then live, and yet not we, because Christ 
lives in us. He has the right of way, holds the 
reins of authority, directs our tasks, sustains in 
weariness of toil, and transfers our reliances 
from the sentiments of mankind to the inspira- 
tions of his own life. Having thus cut us adrift 
from the influence of custom and conventionality, 
we find our freedom in the unembarrassed activ- 
ity of our aspirational nature. Here our eye 
becomes single and our whole body full of light. 
Here we see light in God's light and get a con- 
sciousness of illumination that the university 
cannot give. Life becomes positive, aggressive, 
triumphant. '"He that raised up Christ Jesus 
from the dead shall quicken also your mortal 
bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you." 
(Rom. 8. 11.) 

The influence of Christ's teaching concerning 
immortality may be seen best in the history of the 
first three centuries. In those days the Romans 
cremated their dead and buried or preserved 



IMMORTALITY 155 

only the ashes. The Jews abhorred this custom, 
and, in the vicinity of Rome, deposited their dead 
in the catacombs even before Christ. During 
their persecutions, this "underground sleeping 
place" became the sacred shelter of both the liv- 
ing and the dead. These underground passages, 
and rooms, cut out of soft volcanic rock, are 
beneath the hills that surround Rome. They are 
so extensive that their estimated length, in a 
straight line, is from three hundred to four hun- 
dred miles. When these became a place of refuge 
for the living, chapels, living-rooms, and storage 
rooms, with ventilation secured by openings at 
the top, became common. Wells were dug 
for the supply of fresh water. To the Chris- 
tians this underground dwelling-place gradually 
became holy ground. How wretchedly men, 
women, and children lived in these excavations 
will never be known, but we have a record of 
their cheerful patience, their heroic endurance, 
their sublime courage, and their triumphant faith. 
On October 28, A. D. 312, Constantine entered 
Rome in triumph, which announced the end of 
imperial paganism and Christian persecutions. 
Christianity emerged from her underground 
abode and built churches. In order to perpetuate 
the catacombs as the "underground sleeping 
place" for their dead, the Christians now reno- 
vated and repaired certain portions, adding new 
tombs, new chapels, and new decorations. When 



156 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

the Barbarians, under Alaric (A. D. 410), con- 
quered Rome, the catacombs were closed up with 
earth, soon forgotten, and remained in undis- 
turbed silence until the sixteenth century. An- 
tonio Bosio spent thirty-six years in groping his 
way through these dark passages, deciphering 
inscriptions and copying pictures. The results of 
his search were published in 1635, five years after 
his death. Since then other explorers have pub- 
lished accounts of valuable discoveries. Eleven 
thousand inscriptions have been deciphered, of 
which number, Rossi says, six thousand belong 
to the first four centuries and four thousand 
before the time of Constantine. All are Roman 
and anterior to the close of the sixth century. 
The Lapidarian Gallery in the Vatican, eight 
hundred feet long, has the walls on both sides 
covered with slabs of stone containing about 
three thousand inscriptions. On one side are 
pagan inscriptions and on the opposite side the 
Christian. In this manner the dead yet speak. 
The contrast between pagan and Christian is 
striking and instructive. Nothing more clearly 
reveals how the New Testament teaching con- 
cerning immortality took hold of the mind and 
sustained the life of the Ante-Nicene Church. 

First. It means much that "no sign of the 
cross, no picture of the sufferings of Christ 
appears on the tombs of the first two centuries." 
Those early Christians seem to have thought 



IMMORTALITY 157 

more of Christ's life than of his death. As his 
life was triumphant, the sufferings through 
which he passed became a negligible considera- 
tion. With their vision of immortality, every- 
thing that appears on these tombs is cheerful, 
hopeful, buoyant. Christ is pictured as the Good 
Shepherd, with a lamb in his arms. We find 
Christ symbolized by the vine, and pictures of 
healing, of feeding the five thousand, of the rais- 
ing of Lazarus, of Christ's triumphal entrance 
into Jerusalem, and the cheerful scenes of Old 
Testament history. The dove, the anchor, the 
ship, and the palm are favorite symbols. 

Second. We have the inscriptions that inter- 
pret the final experiences of despair or hope in 
the dying. I have selected twelve of these in- 
scriptions from each side of the gallery as their 
publication reports them. 1 On the pagan side of 
the gallery this is the message of the dying to the 
living : 

1. "Life is a trifling gift." 

2. "Live for the present hour, since we are 
sure of nothing else." 

3. "I lived as I liked, but I do not know why 
I died." 

4. "I was not. I am. I shall not be." 

5. "I lift my hands against the gods who took 
me away at the age of twenty, though I had done 
no harm." 



"Events and Epochs in Religious History," pp. 1-45. J. F. Clarke. 



1 58 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION 

6. "One who lost five of his family in one day 
says, 'The angry gods gave all five, in one day, 
to an everlasting sleep.' " 

7. "Traveler, curse me not as you pass, for I 
am in darkness, and cannot answer." 

8. "Here I lie in darkness, unhappy girl." 

9. "Our hope was in our boy. Now all is grief 
and ashes." 

10. "I have struggled for eighty years. Now 
I am quiet." 

11. "When my daughter Lyda died, the model 
of beauty perished. Strangers who pass, fill with 
tears the hollow recess in this marble." 

12. "The bones of Nicen are buried here. Ye 
who live in the upper air, live on and farewell. 
Hail ye below. Receive Nicen." 

From the opposite side of the gallery we may 
hear the church of the Ante-Nicene Fathers 
speaking. 

1. "Aurelia, our sweet daughter, retired from 
the world." 

2. "Sylvana, who sleeps here in peace." 

3. "Called away by angels." 

4. "He departed in peace." 

5. "He went to God." 

6. "Being called away, he went in peace." 

7. "He sleeps, but lives." 

8. "He went before us in peace." 

9. "The earth holds his body, the heavenly 
realm his soul." 



IMMORTALITY 159 

10. "The mind, unconscious of death, lives, 
and, quite conscious, enjoys the sight of Christ." 

11. "The sleeping place of Elpis." 

12. "Petronia, wife of a Levite. Spare your 
tears, sweet daughters and husband, and know 
that it is wrong to weep for one who is alive with 
God." 

These contrasts show us the distance God 
carried us when he translated us from the domin- 
ion of darkness into the kingdom of his dear Son. 
(Col. 1. 13.) Here, life takes on a value that 
cannot be measured by any standard of the mate- 
rial level. The afflictions of this life are not 
worthy to be compared with the glory of our 
immortality on the spiritual level. Our compen- 
sations are the riches of glory in Christ Jesus, the 
power of an endless life, the breadth and length 
and depth and height of the love of God at last 
made manifest, the riches of the glory of God's 
inheritance in us (Eph. 1. 18), and the eternal 
triumph of our expansive citizenship in heaven. 



The Twentieth Century Interpretation 
of Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians 

By H. R. BENDER, D.D. 

Clearfield, Pa., U. S. A. 



Rev. David Spencer, D.D., Tokyo, Japan: 

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with 500 copies of your excellent book for use of our work 
in Japan. This is a book that the Japanese can understand 
and will be much profited in its use. Please do this for the 
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of the publishing interests, disposed of 500 
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This is a book of 116 pages, bound in cloth, large, 
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